
aass_H^:fJIZ5i^ 



Book 






Copyright N^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BOHLEN LECTURES FOR 1905. 

The Temporary and the Permanent 
In Hew Testament Revelation 



BY 

HARRY PEIRCE NICHOLS, D.D. 

RECTOR HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, NEW YORK 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 
1 and 3 Bible House 




,^5 



LIBRARY of aO!S!-3»F.SS 



>5i ^ AAC. WOJ 



Copyright, 1905, 
By Thomas Whittaker. 



A. G. SHERWOOD & CO. 
PRINTERS NEW YORK 



THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 



John Bohlen, who died in Philadelphia on the twenty- 
sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund 
of One Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to 
religious and charitable objects in accordance with the 
well-known wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees, 
under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and paid over 
to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of 
the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia," in trust, 
a sum of money for certain designated purposes, out of 
which fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set 
apart for the endowment of The John Bohlen Lecture- 
ship, upon the following terms and conditions : — 

"The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe securi- 
ties, and held in trust for a fund to be called The John Bohlen Lec- 
tureship; and the income shall be applied annually to the payment of a 
qualified person, whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery [and 
publication of at least one hundred copies of two or more lecture ser- 
mons. These lectures shall be delivered at such time and place, in the 
city of Philadelphia, as the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer 
shall from time to time determine, giving at least six months' notice to 
the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may con- 



IV THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 

veniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as lecturer 
a second time within a period of five years. The payment shall be 
made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and received 
by the trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said fund, 
after defraying the expense of printing the lectures and the other inci- 
dental expenses attending the same. 

"The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the terms 
set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the delivery of what 
are known as the ' Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject 
distinctively connected with or relating to the Christian Religion. 

'* The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of May, or 
as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the persons who 
for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy 
Trinity; the Rector of said Church; the Professor of Biblical Learning, 
the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical 
History, in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 
Philadelphia. 

" In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may nominate 
the lecturer." 

Under this trust the Reverened H. P. Nichols, D. D, of New York, 
N. Y. was appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1905. 



CONTENTS. 

LECTURE I. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT INHERENT IN 
REVELATION. 

PAGE 

I. The suspected positions of one age become the 

accepted commonplaces of another . . i 

The temporary and permanent to be separated 
on recognized principles ; the results to be 
appropriated as of foremost value for a rea- 
sonable Christianity ...... 4 

II. The title may offend on first hearing. 

The principle involved has long been conceded 5 

III. The keynote of the separation of temporary 

and permanent is Translation ... 8 

Duty to translate whatever is to be kept alive. 9 
Translation to be applied to New Testament as 

to all other possessions of value . . .13 
The individual makes his own by translation . 14 

IV. Universality another keynote of separation of 

temporary and permanent . . . .15 
Universality of the Gospel our boast . , 16 
AVhat is of universal value learned by discrimina- 
tion. . 16 



VI CONTENTS 



The universal discovered by degrees . . i8 
Creed and Liturgy constantly throwing off tem- 
porary 24 

V. The principle of Separation has been already 

admitted 27 

In New Testament times 28 

In the history of the Church . , . .30 

VI. Outline of the course of lectures . , • 32 



LECTURE IL 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN A WRITTEN 

REVELATION. 

I. Christianity the Religion of a Book , . .34 
The Church existed before the Book ; and a 

Revelation requires one to receive it . .34 
Yet the Book is the standard and witness of 

Christianity 35 

The Book is Christianity's characteristic and 

glory 37 

II. The Book demands separation of temporary 

from permanent .40 

Written in time : its contents to be determined ; 

to be interpreted .40 

The Canon illustrates this separation . . 43 

The forming of the Canon a historical process . 44 
Study of its method confirms our faith in its 

value . '47 



CONTENTS Vll 



III. Inspiration of less moment than canonicity . 51 
Inspiration does not extend to individual style . 53 
Does not belong to all Scripture alike. The 

liturgical use of the Bible may select and omit 

the temporary 55 

IV. The separation of temporary and permanent 

applies to interpretation of the Book . . 60 
Every sacred book has a partly earthly, partly 

heavenly parentage ...... 62 

Use of Old Testament by New Testament writers, 

notably Christ 65 

A less fragmentary view of the Scriptures is 

growing ....... 69 

V. What remains of God's Word for God's people 70 



LECTURE III. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN THE 
INCARNATION. 

The Man is behind the Book. 

I, The Incarnation is the concentreing fact of 

thought and hope 76 

The Incarnation involves race, family, place, 

time, education, opportunity . . -77 

The union of the divine and human is the glory 

and the difficulty of the Incarnation . . 78 
The Christ of History and of Experience must 

eliminate temporary factors , . .80 

The divine Christ emerges , , . , Zd 



VI 11 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

II. These considerations have a theological and a 
practical bearing. 

1. Theological ZZ 

(i) The incarnate Christ laid aside meta- 
physical attributes . . . .89 

(2) Christ's knowledge limited in the Incar- 

nation ....... 92 

(3) The moral attributes undiminished in 

the Incarnation . , . , . 98 
The virgin birth .... 102 

2. Practical, 

(i) Our only satisfying knowledge of God 

through Christ 104 

Anthropomorphism . . . 106 
(2) Imitation of God possible only through 

the Incarnation , . . , . 108 
Following Christ , . , .110 
III. Our natural approach to God by the human 

Christ 114 



LECTURE IV. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN CHRIST's 
TEACHING. 

I. Christ's teaching a prominent factor of the Incar- 
nation , .117 

Yet His Person first 117 

Christ's teaching involves inevitable temporary 
elements . . . . . . .119 

Singularly free from the temporary . . ,120 



CONTENTS IX 



II. General considerations on temporary and per- 
manent aspects of Christ's teaching, 

1. Christ's teaching had an intelligible meaning 
for His immediate hearers .... 123 

2. Christ uses the language of accommodation. 128 

Possession by demons 130 

Critical questions on the old Testa- 
ment ...,.,.. 132 
Argumentum ad hominem . . , . 132 

3. Christ an oriental speaking to orientals . 134 

4. Christ's teaching principles, not rules . 137 
Literalism of St. Francis and Tolstoi . , . 141 

III, Examples of these general considerations . 143 

1. Characteristic concrete passages in the Sermon 
on the Mount 145 

Associated charities . , . 146 
Riches , . . . 148 

2. The teaching of the great Forty Days . 149 

Place of Church and Sacraments in Christ's 
teaching 150 

3. Teaching about Sacrifice .... 155 



LECTURE V. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN ST. PAUL's 

THEOLOGY. 

I. Paul the Christian theologian .... 160 
A man of his time .... 163 



CONTENTS 



Roman citizen ..... 163 

Rabbi-trained Jew . . , 164 
Paul's Epistles a struggle to express in words 

the experiences of his soul .... 165 

II, Two channels into which Paul's utterance con- 
strained : Roman and Jewish, forensic and 
rabbinic. Run into each other, yet distin- 
guishable. Neither part of Christianity's 
final form. All reasoning processes a neces- 
sary taint of temporariness .... 169 

Paul saves his reasonings by doxologies and 
practical conclusions ..... 175 

III. Examples of Roman or forensic lines of argu- 

ment. 

1. Adoption : its modern and its Roman 
meaning ....... 179 

2. Justification : both forensic and rabbinic . 184 

IV. Examples of Jewish or rabbinic lines of argu- 

ment. 

Paul a rabbi and not a priest . . . .185 

His rabbinism logic rather than theology . 186 

1. Rabbinical dealing with facts . . . 188 

2. Rabbinical methods of exegesis , , 190 

V, Examples of practical instructions of a tem- 
porary character. 

1. Favorite figures of illustration . . . 195 

2. Instruction to particular churches . . 195 
Women to cover their heads in Corinth . 196 



CONTENTS XI 



LECTURE VI. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN THE APOCALYP- 
TIC STYLE. 

PAGE 

The fact of that style. 

Prevalent and popular in New Testament times 200 
Apocalyptic style closely associated with 

Eschatological subjects .... 202 
The Apocalyptic style marked by : 

1. Use of intense, often gross figures. 

2. Fantastic, artificial habit. 

3. Enigmatic utterance, 

4. A sense of superiority. 

5. Conjuring by Phrases .... 203 
Fastens on Christianity a grotesque concep- 
tion of religion, disloyal to the Gospel , 206 

Apocalyptic style has its value, as poetry and 

vision 210 

II. Christ's use of the apocalyptic style. 

Uses it as current style of the time . .216 

The Evangelical records exaggerate Christ's 
apocalyptic language . , . ,219 

Christ teaches a delayed as well as an imme- 
diate coming 225 

Christ's apocalyptic sayings may be inter- 
preted as being already in fulfilment . . 229 

Christ's coming 

(i) A present fact. 

(2) A spiritual fact, 

(3) A progressive fact. 

(4) A fact conditioned by man's response 230 



Xll CONTENTS 



III. Later New Testament writers, in their 

apocalyptic utterance, share current miscon- 
ceptions, must share any helpful interpreta- 
tion 233 

St. John could hardly have written both the 
Gospel and Book of Revelation . . , 236 

John touches the apocalyptic word into eternal 
meaning. ...... 240 

IV. The Mystical and the Practical. 

The mystical bridges over the chasm between 
the Apocalyptic and the Practical . . 242 



LECTURE I. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT INHERENT 
IN REVELATION. 

I. The positions of one age, held in suspicion 
merely because they are new, become the easily 
accepted commonplaces of another age. The 
ceremonial which to a former generation seemed 
elaborate, the mark of an advanced school, Is 
everywhere In use without question, and with- 
out fear. The current beliefs of Christian peo- 
ple put suddenly by the side of beliefs obtaining 
in the middle of the last century are a surprising 
revelation of a forward movement, a progress 
made unconsciously, yet accepted without hesi- 
tation. While the movement is in course there 
is inevitable pain and anxiety. 

It belongs to those who stand In the place of 
leadership, whether as thinkers or administra- 
tors, both to realize this constant movement 



2 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

themselves and to discover the principles that 
underlie its healthy advance. It is for them, and 
among these we must class ourselves, as well 
from our education as from our ministerial 
office, in view of what the history of religious 
progress has taught, to take up such study with 
good cheer and to disarm the prejudices of 
others. These changes are certain. They result 
in larger vision of truth and of service. Men 
busied in their Investigation are put In trust of 
their value. By their own hopefulness concern- 
ing the issue, as well as by their own moderation 
in statement, they may offset the natural dis- 
trust of the mass of Christian people, may make 
the Inevitable revolution so peaceful that all 
shall gratefully share Its blessings. Despite the 
alarm and even the dangers involved in these 
progressive investigations, it Is not only our 
duty to undertake them, but we have the ability 
to carry them through to an honorable issue. 
For this we have been prepared by the study of 
history, wherein we see these processes ever 
going on, and by the breadth of vision which 



INHERENT IN REVEIATION 



comes with all scholarship. Courage in the 
work, confidence in the result, consideration for 
the fears and ignorance of others as the process 
goes on, — these are the works demanded of 
devout scholarship to-day. To such service 
these lectures bid you, by your sympathetic 
interest, to make your willing contribution. We 
may be able at least to blaze the way along 
which others shall clear a road for Christian 
thought to travel. 

There are three classes of questions that 
enlist the interest of Christian people : social 
questions ; philosophical questions, the being of 
God, the person of Christ, the relation of sin to 
salvation ; critical questions, involving the origin, 
interpretation and value of the Scriptures. 

My subject ranges itself with the last of these. 
The place of the Scriptures, specially of the 
New Testament, is a fundamental one for Chris- 
tian thinking and Christian service. The records 
of fact and truth by Apostolic men are the key 
to Christianity. How people to-day are to use 
that key. Christian scholarship must discover. 



4 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

The Temporary and the Permanent In New- 
Testament Revelation is the inquiry of these 
lectures. In no critical direction do I see 
greater help than in such an inquiry. The fact 
of these two elements, a temporary and a per- 
manent in revelation, is first to be admitted. 
Principles are to be sought by which these ele- 
ments are to be distinguished. The help in 
such discrimination for an intelligent and rea- 
sonable Christianity is to be set forth. And all 
along, not alone must prejudice be disarmed by 
sympathy and reverence, but approval wait on 
the results to receive their blessing. Such is 
one's preconception in favor of his chosen 
theme, I cannot but feel that in the discrimina- 
tion between the temporary and the permanent 
features in our Christian heritage lies the future 
of Christianity. I would magnify the import- 
ance of the subject and make it honorable. 
*'Back to Christ" is the watchword of Christian 
thinking and Christian living to-day ; the Christ 
recovered must be the permanent Christ out 
from the temporary, else, as in so many experi- 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 5 

ences heretofore, the issue will be fanaticism and 
new discouragement. The whole attitude of 
the Christian religion, intellectual and practical, 
is moulded by the apocalyptic style of the 
Gospels and other New Testament literature ; 
by the theology of Paul's Epistles ; how far are 
style and reasoning part of the permanent 
treasure of the Christian Church ? 

The temporary and the permanent in New 
Testament revelation. 

II. The title of these lectures may offend on 
first hearing. In God's revelation of Himself, 
certainly in the New Testament, there is no 
temporary ; all is permanent. This was the 
conviction of an earlier age. It has come to us 
as a traditional prejudice. Yet, if on examina- 
tion we find that in the history of interpretation 
as well as in our own study some principle of 
discrimination between temporary and per- 
manent has been admitted, we must first cor- 
dially concede the fact in the face of our 
prejudices and our fears : its application, while 
it may be dififtcult and disturbing, will then wait 



6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

on our honest inquiry. To be unwilling to test 
our own convictions, and to analyze the real 
basis of our beliefs, to be unwilling to acknowl- 
edge the party to be wrong in order to save the 
cause, is the last infirmity of earnest and devout 
minds. There is, to be sure, a passing regret, 
excusable enough, that things cannot go on just 
the same, that all men cannot continue to think 
as they used to when, for example, we were 
young. But this is impossible. Men have 
never kept on thinking the same, and they 
never will. The last word has not been said, 
and never ought to be. God's man faces the 
fact with cheerful hope, even though he sup- 
press a sigh. The theme may be new in its 
statement ; but if its principle be found one 
already accepted and acted upon, the brave 
Christian and scholar will take it and use it in 
the service of truth. He is confident of nothing 
so surely as that truth reverently pursued will 
give new cause to thank God, and to believe in 
Christ. '' Seeing then that we have such hope 
we use great plainness of speech." * 
* II Cor. Ill : 12. 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 



Our aim, then, is to realize and acknowledge 
the fact of temporary elements in the New 
Testament ; to cite illustrations ; to discover, if 
we may, principles by which the permanent may 
be discriminated and preserved ; and to find 
fresh reason in this investigation for courageous 
and grateful loyalty to the revealed religion of 
Jesus Christ. Our study will be critical, not 
in the sense of literary criticism — a work so 
admirably performed by Prof. Moulton — nor in 
the sense of the so-called higher criticism, the 
determining of dates and authors — a work in the 
process of settlement in our age from whose 
results no thoughtful man is finding cause to 
shrink back in alarm. Ours is an interpretation 
of critical work already accepted, a making 
results real and applying them to living Chris- 
tianity. 

It is manifest that no more important inquiry 
is opening out before Christian thoughtfulness 
than the elimination of any temporary element 
from New Testament Revelation. That revela- 
tion is unique : in its message of hope ; in the 



5 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Figure it offers for our discipleship. What it 
has to give of permanent value to the world we 
are all coming to feel is the world's great prize. 
Back to the Master pictured in the New Testa- 
ment are coming not only theology and philoso- 
phy, but the races and the religions and the 
social classes of men. We may not dare hide 
that universal Figure under either our present- 
day interpretations or the incidental drapery of 
His own time. The problem is an ever fresh 
one how to find the abiding spiritual in the pass- 
ing historical 

III. The keynote of the separation of the 
temporary and permanent may find expression in 
the pregnant word Translation. The word has 
a richer meaning than the mere rendering from 
one language to another. All man's inner life, 
intellectual and spiritual, is a translation from 
something less real, of less moment, though 
called natural and coming easily, to something 
more true and abiding, even to the perfect. A 
spoken word, a written word, a life lived some. 
when and somewhere, a truth discovered in the 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 



germ, all must be translated. So the tem- 
porary, the incidental, is thrown one side, the 
permanent emerges. Man's Insight, apprehen- 
sion, appropriation is the prime factor in per- 
manency, in making of the thing once presented 
something that may live on for other and wiser 
times. Admit the need of translation, and we 
do admit it with every spoken and written and 
lived word whose first incarnation is foreign to 
us, we have admitted the temporary feature in 
the permanent. Another tongue, another time, 
must make the truth its own. 

Abiding things never appear to man in a pure 
and isolated state. Thought must incarnate 
itself in language to live. '* Words cannot be 
identified with thought," says Sabatier in one 
of his latest works, ''but they are necessary to it. 
The hero in the romance who was said to be 
unable to think without speaking was not so 
ridiculous as was once supposed, for that hero 
is everybody."* The orthodox Moslem will 



* Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 249- 
50. 



lO THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

not listen to translation. Not only is the Koran 
inspired in its every word ; its Arab word is 
alone inspired ; and this when Arabic has 
become absolutely unintelligible in the conquest 
of new races to Moslem allegiance. The Veda 
and Avesta are worshipped after a like petrified 
fashion. A kindred fetichism is the old belief 
that Hebrew was the language of the Garden of 
Eden, and that the Church's lessons should be 
read in a monotone lest man's interpretation be 
intruded into God's word. The early Christians 
translated the Scriptures freely into Syriac, 
Latin, Coptic, into the language of every peo- 
ple to whom they preached the good news of 
their Gospel. There came a time when the 
translation of each ethnic church was itself 
deemed untranslatable ; the Ethiopians, for 
example, applying the theory of verbal inspira- 
tion to their barbarous and unintelligible version 
of the Scriptures.* It was an easy step for the 



* Peters. The Old Testament and the New Scholar- 
ship, 83-84. 



INHERENT IN RE VELA TION 1 1 

Latin Church to refuse the Scriptures to the 
laity. A passing phase was enshrined as per- 
manent, and bhndly worshipped. The striking 
fact remains, however, that a principle of transla- 
tion, of discovering the permanent out of the 
temporary, had been first admitted and then 
abandoned. Lost in the Dark Ages, translation 
becomes anew the touchstone of a living faith, 
translation not merely into the new tongues 
but into the new life and new hopes of ''the 
nations and peoples called of God into the 
Unity of His Church." 

It is man's business as an intelligent and 
responsible being to pass on the gifts of his time, 
its thought and its truth, to those who follow. 
They cannot be passed on as a sealed and en- 
shrined deposit. They must come to the next 
age open and instinct with life. No age, not 
even that of the New Testament, has a monop- 
oly of gifts. Its gifts were rare, were invalu- 
able ; they were bestowed upon the ages as a 
trust to be handed on, to be translated and re- 
translated for every age to come. It is asked, 



12 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Where would an apostle or early saint feel at 
home, in creed and ceremonial, were he to come 
suddenly into our modern Christian thought and 
life? Nowhere, we may answer, if he came sud- 
denly ; unless in some church, or chapel, or creed 
that has isolated itself from the moving Chris- 
tian current, and been left forlorn, its privileges 
forfeited because it has failed to translate them. * 
We may be sure that St. Paul and St. Paul's 
Master, were they to come among us again, 
would rejoice wherever they found a living faith 
discovering and applying the revealed word as 
an eternal word. " The most destructive thing 
in the world, because the most contrary to nature, 
is the strain to keep things fixed." To keep the 
old forms without new adaptation, or to keep 
fixed interpretations for forms that have become 
endeared by ages of reverent use, is to act as 
unbelievers in a living Christ for living men. 
The kernel is ever to be found within the husk, 
to use a vigorous figure of to-day's exegesis, the 



* Bartlett. The Letter and the Spirit, 15 1-2. 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 1 3 

husk be left to perish, or if preserved, kept only 
for antiquarian honor. 

These principles embodied in the word trans- 
lation, are so evident and so universally accepted, 
it may seem gratuitous to repeat and emphasize 
them. May they not be taken for granted, and 
we pass on ? Yet, the taking for granted often 
needs to be brought home, the truth freely 
admitted elsewhere to be courageously applied 
in directions where men hesitate. '* I freely 
admit temporary elements in all religion and the 
necessity of rescuing the permanent from their 
swaddling bands ; I am, of course, prepared to 
concede the temporary character of much of 
what we find in the Old Testament," says a 
thoughtful and devout scholar to me, *'but I 
certainly hesitate to apply that principle to the 
New Testament. That is a revelation given 
once for all, yet for all time." We do well to 
hesitate in applying results of unquestionable 
value for all other human possessions, even for 
the preparatory revelation of God Himself, to 
this final gift from God seen in Jesus Christ. 



14 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Yet the reasonings hold good for the New Tes- 
tament as well, if that revelation comes that it 
may be one of man's possessions, though it be 
the best and greatest of them ; comes in human 
ways to human apprehension. 

The Individual steps forth In each age to make 
the revelation his own, and the individual must 
do a final translating work. Revelation implies 
a receiving spirit. Revelation must have a re- 
sponse in man, not as a measure of the revela- 
tion, but to apprehend it. Without that response 
there Is no revelation ; for the revelation is not 
an abstraction, something existing of itself, it is 
an intelligible word to an apprehending soul. 
The soul must make it his own. God does 
nothing which concerns man's well-being apart 
from man himself. "God does not begin," it 
has been admirably said, " where man leaves off; 
we need not sit with our hands folded to hearken 
what he will say concerning us." * We put our- 
selves into the attitude of hearers, of helpers of 



Canon Inge on the Inspiration of the Individual. 



INHERENT IN R EVE I A TION I 5 

the revelation. The human reception puts the 
changing temporary element face to face with 
the divine permanency. It is not a question of 
what it is possible for God to give, but of what 
it is possible to make our own. Man can receive 
from God what he has an intuitive power to 
grasp. That is the divine side of man's knowl- 
edge. " All reasoned conviction," says Marti- 
neau, " is human ; immediate intuition is divine." * 
Intuition is man's last attitude toward a word of 
God. That intuitive attitude is not reached till 
sense and reason have done their necessary work, 
till the man has heard the voice in a language 
that he can understand and so is prepared to 
recognize that the voice is none other than the 
Voice of God. A Revelation given once for all 
within human limitations must be appropriated 
of man, age after age, according to his time and 
race and tongue, according to his place in the 
developing order. 

IV. Further, if Christianity is a universal reli- 
gion, if the New Testament has a message for all 

* Martineau's Seat of Authority 320-21. 



1 6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

races of men In all time, there must be a separa- 
tion of the permanent from the temporary In Its 
revelation of truth. As Translation Is one key- 
note In the evolution of the permanent from the 
temporary elements In revelation, translation 
Into the language and thought of another time, 
translation Into the receptivity of the Individual, 
Universality Is another such note. Its universal 
character Is shown as we put Its local limitations 
one side. 

The universal application of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ Is our gladness and our boast. It Is 
the stronghold of missionary effort. It Is the 
basis of our superior confidence In the religion 
of Christ as compared with ethnic religions. 
That confidence perishes if features appropriate 
to Its first promulgation are to be imposed upon 
all times and races. If baptism In any given 

amount of water be of the essence of the 
regenerating sacrament, then the Christian 

religion must be limited in country and climate. 

What is of universal value is to be ascertained 

by discrimination. It is the business of the 



INHERENT IN RE VELA TION I / 

religious man, of the man concerned with char- 
acter-making, to distinguish differences, to sift 
that he may save what is worth saving. He 
may not accept things in the bulk, as they are, 
if he be in trust of a possession for all mankind. 
He cannot stop with Leviticus or John Baptist 
or Judaizing Christianity, though each serve as 
ushers to fuller truth. God reveals Himself to 
mankind as a whole by degrees ; the universal 
features of His revelation are to be tested by 
devout inquiry and consecrated experience. 
Christianity bids a man, as he stands in trust 
for the race, to decide between differences and 
keep what is to be kept. It bids him realize 
that truth and duty are not all clear, nor on the 
surface ; that there are reasons both ways, that 
no one can be compelled to be good, that there 
is always escape to the other alternative,* that 
there is something to find and when found to 
hold on to. It proclaims that the inner man, 
the individual inner man, is the ultimate author- 



Latham's Pastor Pastorum 24, passim. 



1 8 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

ity, and if that authority proclaims a truth or a 
duty to be unquestionable believe it and do it 
the man must, though he stand alone in the 
universe with God as he knows Him. It avows 
at last that behind Holy Scripture is the Holy 
Spirit, and the voice of the Spirit is heard of all 
men in all ages whispering God's way and will, 
whispering even the meaning of God's Revela- 
tion made in His Son. The universal man will 
bring this universal test to revealed truth, using 
all the light that all the ages have given to 
make revelation plain to him, to save him from 
his own ignorance and pride. 

If a religion is universal, temporary features 
are to be looked for in its revelation. Only the 
limited says at once all it has to say. We find 
as fact that the method of the Universal Father 
unfolding His counsels has been to speak first 
to a family, a tribe, a race ; to use an individual, 
a group, a Church, as the medium of his mes- 
sage. What is thought at first to be one' sown 
is found to be too large, too deep to be kept as 
an exclusive possession ; demands translation, 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 1 9 

expansion ; is held in trust to be shared with 
others and adapted for their use. Its universal- 
ity is a discovery, hardly suspected till its value 
is found not to be satisfied by its first meaning 
and use. This has been a process shared alike 
by prophecies uttered in the old dispensation 
and by words of Christ spoken in the new. 
Proclaimed at the outset as universal they would 
neither have been accepted nor understood. 
Their universality is a process both of realiza- 
tion and of adaptation. 

No institution, no Bible has any value apart 
from its serviceableness to men ; it proves its 
right to exist by its power of adaptation. This 
power of adaptation is the very proof that the 
Christian religion is universal. If Christianity 
had been what many have again and again 
claimed she was, tied to some perishable dogma, 
affiliated to some political notion, bound fast to 
some ecclesiastical or social organization ; if her 
truth had crystallized the hard creed of the 
Donatists, if her politics had become linked 
with the divine right of kings, if her social order 



20 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

had adopted the cult of the ascetic or the 
leveler — proof texts for all these to be found by 
the worshipper of the letter as itself permanent 
and untranslatable — she would ere this have 
either perished as valueless or survived only as 
the property of the bigot.* A downward ten- 
dency inheres in all human systems, a tendency 
to become narrow and preempted. A divine 
gift for mankind must be able to bear the search- 
ing light of criticism, the white light of public- 
ity. The permanent can stand it, comes out 
more precious. Behold ! how our Lord Jesus 
Christ is passing on through the ages, receiving 
from each their characteristic homage. We 
creatures of a day would enshrine Him as our 
own peculiar possession ; He breaks through the 
graveclothes to be the living Lord of living men. 
This universal character of the Christian reli- 
gion, at once our proud claim and its distinctive 
mark, brings on the separation of the temporary 
from the permanent elements in its presentation. 
The New Testament Revelation cannot survive, 



^ Bartlett, Letter and Spirit, 126. 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 21 

save as an historic monument, unless this dis- 
tinction is both realized and applied. Christ 
Himself will survive, for the New Testament 
may be said to be no longer essential to man's 
knowledge of Him. He has been discovered as 
greater than the records about Him. While we 
return to that record to confirm our picture, we 
find Him not entombed in its pages but shining 
forth from them. Christ could live on, the 
Gospel could live on, were the Gospels as the 
story of His Life to perish. It is well for us to 
realize that neither on the Church nor on the 
Scripture rests the preservation of Christ for 
man, however essential heretofore has been 
their witness. Christ's life has been now written 
on the tablets of the heart. The loss of the 
records, the failure of the Church would be 
grave, it would not be ruinous. 

Each age asks. Is the Christian Religion 
doomed because incapable of adapting itself to 
changing conditions ? The answer sometimes 
seems to be. Yes, because men have made the 
temporary features permanent, have bound 



22 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

inseparably together the universal and the per- 
ishable. Religion itself can never perish. 
Where do you find the religion for man ? 
Christians are put on the defensive to show that 
the religion to survive is the religion of our 
Lord Jesus Christ as given in the New Testa- 
ment. Man is incorrigibly religious ; shall his 
religion continue to be the religion of the 
Gospel ? The very condition of life is adapta- 
tion to environment. ''If the age has not lost 
faith," writes Bishop Boyd Carpenter in his 
Bampton Lectures, '' has it lost faith in religion, 
and is Christianity slowly taking the place 
among extinct things, like the flora and fauna of 
earlier times, doomed because lacking power to 
adapt itself to changed conditions ? " * Christi- 
anity did so adapt itself in the earliest Christian 
ages, despite the panic fear of conservative 
Judaizers ; and carried as champions of its 
adaptation conservatives like Peter and James. 
The story of the elimination of the temporary is 



* The Permanent Elements of Religion. Boyd Carpen- 
ter, 4. 



INHERENT IN REVEIATION 23 

recorded step by step in the very New Testa- 
ment record itself. It is a failure to share the 
faith and courage of New Testament men to 
hesitate to continue that separating process, to 
pronounce the work complete at any stage earlier 
or later. Those men faced in their adaptations 
a weight of traditionalism, both without and in 
their own hearts, which leaves us timid and faith- 
less in even our radicalism. '' Man's permanent 
spiritual demand," says the Bampton lecturer, 
*'is for Dependence, Fellowship and Progress."* 
It is for us to determine whether these demands 
are met in the New Testament and by what 
wise reading thereof they are to be discovered 
and retained. 

We talk of the Everlasting Gospel, but it is 
not its form that is everlasting, but the spirit 
behind the form. Revealed religion has its value, 
but that value is not to relieve man from the 
duty of thinking ; to give him nourishment 
already elaborated, requiring neither digestion 



* Boyd Carpenter, Chap. II. 



24 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

nor assimilation. That were to empty revelation 
of beauty and cut man off from development. 
" Natural Religion," says Martineau, '' repre- 
sents God, stands for Him, manifests Him ; 
Revealed Religion presents God, brings Him 
into man's immediate presence." "^ Yet it does 
not save man from the duty of recognizing and 
appropriating the revelation when made. 

Theology, the science of God, is permanent 
truth reached from temporary. In theology we 
are ever sloughing off temporary features to find 
the everlasting God. Transient doubts give 
way to permanent spiritual convictions by tenta- 
tive processes, by embodiment in successive and 
passing formulae, by the assertion of the eternal 
Yea over the passing Nay. 

The Church, as the society of God's children, 
is finding in her historic creeds and liturgies the 
permanent out from the temporary. Men must 
make symbols individually real, lest the genera- 
tion be orthodox and not pious. The historic 



Jackson's Martineau, 257. 



INHERENT IN RE VELA TION 2 5 

creeds themselves are not in the words of the 
New Testament. They appeal for their vindi- 
cation to the New Testament. They aim to 
utter nothing that can not be proved from sacred 
Scripture. Not only do the creeds incorporate 
other lanofuao^e than that of the New Testament 
in their expression of faith ; they also lay new 
emphasis, enlarging on truths on which Scripture 
utters but a brief word or makes but a hint. 
The creeds were composed, as the New Testa- 
ment books were written, all honest thinking 
now agrees, to answer the questions of their 
time. The answers are given in the language 
and after the light of the time itself. They are 
to be translated into the language of each age 
for universal illumination. We must be as fear-^ 
less, while we are as reverent, as the framers of 
the creeds. As they dealt with the Scripture, so 
may we. As they dealt with the sacred for- 
mulae come down to them from Apostolic men, 
so may we deal with the formulae they have 
handed on to us. The spirit that guided them 
still guides the Church, and it is the same Spirit 



26 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

which was promised by the Master to His 
immediate disciples. We may not rewrite 
Scripture, though each generation has its 
version, and rejoices courageously when its 
version better expresses the Scripture word, 
though the new expression overthrow cherished 
ideas. We may not rewrite the historic creeds 
(In some paragraphs we honestly wish we might), 
both because Christendom is divided and can 
never be brought to agree on any change, and 
because they are liturgical hymns of praise 
endeared to Christian people in their very lan- 
guage by generations of use. But we may explain, 
paraphrase, interpret, translate, for our children 
and our time. We may find the eternal truths 
under their fleeting expression, truths as dear to 
us as to the original formulators, though our 
explanation be otherwise — the truths of the 
Eternal God, of the Incarnate Son taking our 
complete human nature even into the realms of 
the dead, to whom as risen Lord is committed 
all judgment and authority ; of continued con- 
scious identity, the spirit being clothed upon 



INHERENT IN RE VELA TION 2 / 

with a body, we affirm not how, preferring the 
reticence of St. Paul to the confident materiaHsm 
of a less thoughtful time. 

V. These are the considerations to which I 
invite you in this course of lectures. My hope is 
that we may be wise enough and brave enough 
and trustful enough to recognize as a principle the 
distinction between permanent and temporary 
in our New Testament Charter. The principle 
admitted, we may go on to apply it and to start 
applications for others to work out. The prin- 
ciple is already admitted by the process of 
Translation to which we have submitted our 
sacred documents in every age and land, and to 
which we are increasingly bringing the symbols 
and ceremonial of the Christian Church. The 
principle is essential to our proud boast that 
Christianity is for all men of all time. In it 
is wrapped up the opportunities of Christian 
scholarship and the hopes of Christian aspiration 
for the days immediately before us. 

Though the subject may seem to be and has 
been spoken of as new, like all inquiries after 



28 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

truth it has had Its times of advocacy, it Is 
involved in many subordinate religious subjects 
whose pursuit has been carried afar. Many 
skillful and honored hands have undertaken tasks 
involving this supreme distinction, from whose 
results the Church has realized invaluable bene- 
fit, though failing to apply the truth for them- 
selves, or to honor its fearless advocacy. 

The history of Christianity has been the story 
of man's constant effort. In his wisest and most 
earnest representatives, to separate and to 
transmit the permanent elements in the Chris- 
tian religion. The temporary has constantly 
had to give way. The timid have ever feared 
lest in the process the ark of God should fall. 
Recall, for a concluding moment, the story of 
such work. 

In the establishment of Christianity, as re- 
corded in the book of Acts, the original disci- 
ples proved unable to shake off the fetters of a 
passing thought and ceremonial. St. Paul was 
called of the Spirit to save Christianity from 
being a Jewish sect which simply confessed the 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 2g 

Messiah to have come. Whatever bonds of his 
own fastening St. Paul laid upon primitive 
Christianity, he " transplanted the young reli- 
gion," in the appreciative words of Wernle, '' into 
the great world of civilization, created its first 
profound system of thought, and developed a 
new form of personal religion. In so doing he 
was the first to introduce Christianity into the 
w^orld's history." * Yet Paul's Epistles not only 
present, as we shall see at greater length, lines 
of reasoning which have ceased to be living, 
but abound in the discussion of questions whose 
principles and conclusions are alike obsolete. 
The place of woman to-day in the family and 
in the social order cannot be that she held in 
Corinth ; nor the duties of citizenship in a free 
republic be those of a Roman under the Caesars. 
That the large vision of the Apostle enabled 
him to discern great principles within passing 
usages did not save him from frequent detailed 
directions which a growing Christianity must 



* Wernle. Beginnings of Christianity, 358. 



30 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 



cast off. That good men still affirm the bind- 
ing obligation of these details of St. Paul is one 
reason for these lectures. 

The names of praise In the history of the 
Church's scholarship are those of men, who up 
to their best light have endeavored to discover 
and champion the permanent in the Christian 
oracles. Origin first, with many a Greek father 
following ; even Augustine in his uncontrover- 
sial writings ; England's great Hooker ; men in 
our own time at such opposite poles as Bishop 
Gore, and James Martineau, the latter writing 
on the Severance of Undivine Elements from 
Religion ; at least two Bampton courses, that of 
Boyd Carpenter in 1887 on the Permanent 
Elements of Religion, that of Robert Edward 
Barlett in 1888 on the Letter and the Spirit, all 
bear witness to the reality of this present theme. 

In the practical working of the Church the 
same witness is borne. The High Churchmen 
contends that many portions of the Prayer Book, 
especially the additions made in the Second 
Book, were concessions to the spirit of the time 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 3 1 

which will be dropped from the permanent book 
that is to be. The Broad Churchman finds in 
older features of the liturgy phraseology retained 
w^hich, if it may not be dropped as obsolete and 
even untrue for us, must yet be allowed the wid- 
est latitude of interpretation. In the whole 
system of the lectionary and of special Psalms, 
which latter is curiously enough the revival of a 
more primitive and catholic usage, the principle of 
selection affirms a permanent and universal value 
of some parts of Scripture over others. 

Nothing of value has been lost in the conces- 
sions heretofore made of temporary features in 
the divine revelation. The principle once ad- 
mitted, there remains only the long process of 
its careful application. The ground taken in 
these lectures is already familiar ; we have simply 
failed to realize it and to draw honest conclu- 
sions. Men have felt that a halt must be called 
somewhere, and they have called it, with hue 
and cry of danger, just where they felt comfort- 
able in halting themselves. The truth is, there 
can be no halt in applying this illuminating truth 



32 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

to the Church's endowment, till all the perma- 
nent treasure has been discovered and recovered, 
while the temporary is relegated to its proper 
and useful place as matter of scaffolding and 
history. 

VI. It is proposed to follow this preliminary 
lecture, whose aim has been to affirm the idea 
of permanent and temporary features in the New 
Testament revelation and to secure its respect- 
ful recognition, with such illustrative application 
as time and ability allow. 

I shall first try to show that a written reve- 
lation necessarily involves temporary features, to 
be reckoned with and discarded. Taking up 
then the Person of Christ of Whose work and 
word the revelation is witness, I shall ask you to 
study the temporary features involved of neces- 
sity in the Incarnation ; and then those to be 
found and separated from the very Teachings of 
Christ Himself. The methods and conclusions 
of St. Paul's Theology will be our next study, 
bringing to light temporary characteristics of 
marked influence and perhaps injury on the 



INHERENT IN REVELATION 33 

Christian faith. A final lecture on the tempo- 
rary type of Christian thought seen in apocalyp- 
tic utterance will serve to draw a helpful line 
between the mystical and the practical in Chris- 
tianity. 

We are laying out for ourselves a hard task. 
We must pray first of all for the spirit to think 
and to do those things that are right, to be saved 
from ingenious and sensational utterance, to have 
as the one object of our study the attainment of 
a better knowledge of Jesus, a fuller appreciation 
of the Christian religion. 



LECTURE II. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN A WRIT- 
TEN REVELATION. 

I. Christianity has been maintained, at least 
by the Protestant world, to be the Religion of a 
Book. 

The sweeping pronouncement that ours is a 
book religion, though an article of faith in which 
most of us have been trained, is open to modifi- 
cation. In applying the corrective we must not 
swing away from the truth. 

Two facts limit the emphasis to be laid upon 
Christianity as a book religion. 

1. The Church existed before the book, and 
determined what belonged in the book. 

Further, and of still greater significance, 

2. The book is a Revelation of God, is God 
speaking to man. Revelation is a more distinc- 
tive mark of Christianity's book than Inspira- 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 35 

tion. Inspiration is a thing of degrees, and may 
be affirmed of many kinds of utterance, even 
the merely secular. Revelation is a word from 
God alone, telling of His way and His will. 
Revelation implies one receiving the revelation. 
Fearful of the subjective factor in all communi- 
cations we yet must always exercise it. There 
must be a response in the hearer, else there is no 
Word. No amount of authority would estab- 
lish the book, could enforce it, unless the writ- 
ing appealed to conscience, is made one's own. 

While, however, the Church existed before 
the book and set its seal upon it ; while also the 
receiving soul must make the revelation of the 
book its own, still the book is the standard to 
which Christianity must ever refer, by which its 
truth and claims must ever be tested. 

The first of the Lambeth corner-stones of 
union is, '' The Holy Scriptures of the Old and 
New Testaments, as containing all things neces- 
sary to salvation, and as being the rule and 
ultimate standard of faith." 

A former distinguished Bohlen lecturer, whose 



36 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

course on the Peace of the Church I hold to be 
an invaluable manual for intelligent seekers 
after truth as this church is in trust for the same, 
entitles one of his lectures The ArchiveSo '' It 
is impossible to deny," writes Dr. Huntington, 
*'that, for better or for worse, the fortunes of 
Christ's religion have been knitted to a 
book. The argument may be put into three 
sentences. First, the world cannot live, at 
least cannot live contentedly, without religion. 
Secondly, religion cannot live, at least cannot 
adequately live, without records, without an 
authenticated history, a book of words and acts. 
Thirdly, among such books, and they are 
many, the Christian Scriptures, even by the 
confession of unfriendly critics, stand supreme." * 
We hear another witness to the even more 
unqualified position '' that in all civilized religions 
divine revelation is presented to man in the 
form of a sacred writing." " The inner experi- 
ences of men of God," Sabatier goes on to say, 



* Huntington's Peace of the Church, 62, 73. 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 37 

"and the witness of them that they give to the 
world, express themselves naturally in speech, 
and this In Its turn Is transformed Into Scrip- 
ture. . . . The rank of the Hebrew and 
Christian Bible is thus found to be logically 
determined by the moral worth of the Hebrew 
and the Christian religions." * 

As long as apostolic men were alive, personal 
witnesses of Truth Incarnate, a spoken word 
sufficed. When the time came that they must 
be called from earth, their witness became a 
written word. The world now read the message 
It had before listened to and memorized. The 
written word was the message continued In 
the only way it could be continued, and by it 
the witnesses being dead yet speak, and He 
to whom they witness speaks through them. 

That Christianity Is a religion of a book Is 
not a defect In Christianity, is rather its charac- 
teristic and Its glory. The Christian religion Is 



^ Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. 
Page 60. 



38 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

an historical religion, given to men in time, re- 
vealed by persons who have actually lived and 
taught. So the Christian creed is a statement 
of facts, facts in time felt to be facts of eternal 
moment, these facts to be verified as a basis of 
belief and hope. We read the Bible to learn 
what God has done, as well as what God has 
said. As long as men hold on to religion, they 
will hold on to the Christian Scriptures as 
religion's book. 

The value of the book has been exaggerated 
even to making its defenders a laughing stock. 
The bibliolatry of the Hutchinsonians opposed 
to *' Newton's Principia " what they called 
" Moses' Principia," affirming that men are de- 
pendent on the Bible for a knowledge of the 
fundamental principles of all true science and 
philosophy. * Failure to realize the Bible's true 
purpose does not discredit that for which it was 
given ; It rather emphasizes its value by man's 
disposition to extend its scope beyond the legiti- 



* Flint's Agnosticism, 587. 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 39 

mate. The Bible has been worth so much, we 
can sympathize with the reverence for its every 
word felt by the devout Scotchman and his New 
England fellow religionist. Reaction from su- 
perstition must not throw over piety. 

We take up our New Testament. If we are 
honest enough to speak out what we conscien- 
tiously feel, we wish some things therein were 
not there, that certain texts were not as we find 
them. We are not bound in slavery to the 
letter as were our fathers. Perhaps they do not 
belong there. Perhaps their place has been 
overemphasized, missing perspective. Perhaps 
they are of the perishing elements which have 
been '* fulfilled," the language of riddles which in 
God's Providence have now been solved. 

" God, wishing to speak to us, has never 
chosen any but human organs." The divine and 
human elements are constantly and inevitably 
intermingled. Religious men, notably Christian 
men, have been unable or unwilling frankly to 
accept this fact. Life has never been seen apart 
from living beings, nor light apart from luminous 



40 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

vibrations. We are to recognize the method of 
the divine chemistry, reaHze that the divine is 
ever to be discovered enshrined within human 
vestings, and by the exercise of human powers 
of analysis and interpretation. * 

Two sources of authority for the Christian 
ReHgion, two witnesses for Christ in all ages, 
His words, Holy Scripture ; His Spirit, inter- 
preting those words. The Inner is behind the 
outer. The outer is fundamental for the inner 
to work upon and make its own. There must 
be the material for the spirit's moulding. 

n. That the Christian Religion appeals to a 
book, must be tested in its claim and truth by a 
written revelation. Is the first reason for separat- 
ing permanent from temporary elements. 

Any written revelation Involves of necessity 
such separation ; (i) because it Is written in 
time ; (2) because Its true contents must be 
determined ; (3) because its meaning must be 
Interpreted to other ages than Its own. 



'^ Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 61-62 



IN A WRITTEN RE VELA TION 4 1 

A book is a human thing, -a creation of parch- 
ment and hieroglyphics, of signs striving to 
embody thought, within which the revelation is 
bound. Our Bible is " a huge volume, clogged 
by the weight of ancient chronicles, and bending 
beneath a burden of old prophecies hard to be 
understood." * 

A book, our sacred book ; is in a language ; of 
an age ; by many individual writers ; is collected 
in a canon ; must be copied, transmitted, printed, 
translated from earlier to later tongues, to other 
hearts. Language itself, notably written lan- 
guage, demands this translating process. Is para- 
bolic, pictorial, has a style whose expression as 
vestiture of thought varies with the age. Ques- 
tions of inspiration arise over our Book, of can- 
onicity, of editing, of kinds of literature and their 
scope, inevitable questions on a book. From 
all these emerges a permanent message, the tem- 
porary little by little put into the background 
by a reading at once scholarly and devout. 



* Peace of Church, 64, 



42 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Is it loss or gain, that this sacred book must 
be subjected to this clearing process, loss or gain 
that we have this treasure in earthen vessels? 
Are bodies, we may equally ask, a hindrance, or 
a help to the spirit, and as we ask hear the wise 
Apostle claiming for life eternal a spiritual body, 
and desiring not to be unclothed but clothed 
upon. Is the external world either a delusion 
of man's mortal mind or an enemy thrust into 
the presence of an unwilling God ? The Chris- 
tian Hymn of Creation sings of God's need that 
He express Himself in the works of His hands 
and of His joy in the result. Church and Sacra- 
ments, outward and visible signs of an inward 
and spiritual grace, are not concessions to the 
infirmity of man's material nature, but manifes- 
tations of the divine beauty and love. The 
book of God's words invites to open and read 
and interpret, but not as an ungrateful task 
necessitated by earth's limitations ; rather as 
appealing to the joy of study and discovery and 
appropriation. A true alchemy may be set at 
work by which material things are transformed 
into the gold of character. 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 43 

Of these demands, which a written revelation 
inevitably lays upon us, to separate out what is 
permanent, I ask your attention first to the 
Canon as strikingly illustrating the point in 
hand. 

The Canon, originally the rule by which the 
determination was reached, has come to mean 
the result itself, the books belonging in the 
book which make the Bible. The process of 
determining the canon has hitherto been but 
dimly realized even by scholars ; it is now clear 
beyond any question. Study of the process 
startles the student of the Bible ; it changes his 
attitude toward the book, but the change is 
from a conventional feeling to one of growing 
satisfaction and confidence. 

Old copies of the Bible, familiar on candle- 
stands in country parlors, portrayed on the 
cover a hand passing down from mysterious 
clouds a sacred volume bound in gilt. Intended 
as symbolical the picture became theological. 
A heavenly hand appearing detached from a 
body, wrapped about by the mystery of cloudi- 



44 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

ness, holding a book for human hands to seize, 
became our idea of the origin of the Christian 
Scriptures. They lost human, historical, intelli- 
gent connection. To affirm such of them 
seemed a profanation of their sacredness. The 
Bible was put away on a shelf with the uncreated 
Koran, with the Veda which the Brahmins for- 
bade to study as other books are studied, with 
the Law of Moses over whose awful sacredness 
the Scribes of our Lord s day mumbled their 
incantations. 

It has now come to be recognized that the 
forming of the canon of Scripture was a histori- 
cal process, covering some three centuries ; a sift- 
ing work in which much earthly matter was long 
held in solution. Again and again, in different 
quarters, the right of certain books to find a 
place in the Word of God was questioned, while 
others finally excluded were for a time reverently 
received. Though the number of books in ques- 
tion, either for retention or exclusion, was rela- 
tively small ; yet such prized writings as the 
Book of Revelation and the Epistle to the Heb- 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 45 

rews were In doubt till about the year 400, and 
there are manuscripts of the New Testament of 
the tenth century which omit the former. The 
process in determining the books of the New 
Testament was but a repetition of that which 
obtained in forming the Old Testament canon. 
More than five hundred years Intervened between 
the gathering of the books of the Law into the 
first canon, about 440 b. c, and the final allotting 
of Sonor of Sonofs and Ecclesiastes to the sacred 
writings a little before the year 100 of our 
Christian era. Some of the prophetical books 
were In existence five hundred years before their 
authoritative character as a revelation from God 
was acknowledged. * The receiving mind and 
heart were determining by all the methods at its 
command whether it was a word from God. It 
could be Imposed upon by no celestial fireworks. 
There were no signs attached to the books to 
startle or awe into submission. They were 



* Peters. The Old Testament and the New Scholar- 
ship, Chap. I. 



4^ THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

simply writings making a claim on intelligence 
and devotion. It took centuries to decide 
whether that claim was to be acknowledgfed as 
the highest. 

The devout Sabatier has gathered this illu- 
minating fact into a few terse sentences. " The 
Bible appears to us as the work, slowly and 
laboriously constructed, of the ancient Jewish 
Synagogue and of the Early Jewish Church. It 
needed more than four centuries to establish 
and to delimitate the New Testament. The 
books which compose it were still in the time of 
Eusebius divided into two classes : books ad- 
mitted everywhere and books contested. Why 
then should we not have the same liberty as 
Origen of doubting the authenticity of Second 
Peter, for example, or as Denis of Alexandria, 
in discussing the apostolic origin of the Apoca- 
lypse ? " * 

This historical and gradual determining of the 
canon of both Testaments, along lines and In the 



* Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 52, 



IN A WRITTEN RE VELA TION 47 

use of powers familiar to experts in deciding like 
claims, while it is undeniably the process by which 
we have the Holy Bible to-day, is not even yet 
grasped, in its fact and its consequences, by the 
mass of Christian people. The first result, on 
awakening to a realization of this simple method 
of recognizing God's voice, is a feeling of un- 
certainty and anxiety, the second and abiding 
one, a conviction of deep thankfulness. Old and 
traditional conceptions of an unquestioned and 
absolute demarcation between the inspired 
and the uninspired, of a volume bound together 
so to speak at once and once for all, are forever 
lost, and in losing them we bid good-by to that 
which is both false and fragile. Into their place 
comes the vision of a process by which man's 
wisdom divinely illuminated has grown to recog- 
nize the voice as the voice of the Lord. 

We can no longer say, This is divine because, 
it is in the canon and not in the Apocrypha, be- 
cause it is in Peter and not in Clement — it was 
long an open question whether a book should b^ 
put In the canon or relegated to the Apocrypha, 



48 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

whether Clement should be left in and Peter left 
out. There is a deeper test of what is divine 
than being counted among the books, as there 
was another reason for so counting books to be 
sacred than because they were found together. 
Some divine messages are not in the canon, some 
words therein are not from God. Revelation 
and Scripture are not in all their boundaries 
synonymous. God's revelation of Himself is 
not confined to a book. He has also been re- 
vealed to individual souls, to His Church deliber- 
ating on His way and will. The enlightened 
Church, the consecrated soul has become through 
long historical processes the witness to the book, 
voucher for its credentials as a word from God. 
Much of a temporary character remains in the 
book. The Church, as by its wise and devout 
membership of many generations it determined 
what belongs to the book, so by that same illu- 
minated wisdom will it determine the relative 
value of what has been included therein. It has 
never been necessary, as pious but misguided 
ingenuity long argued, that the Bible include 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 49 

just SO much ; that four is, for example, the 
heavenly number for Gospels. We could spare 
some books and still have a revelation of God 
which would meet our essential needs. A book 
might conceivably be added to the canon by which 
our view of God would be made more rich. The 
canon is doubtless closed because we are so far 
removed both from the time and the spirit in 
which the books were written, and because our 
Christianity has made its list of sacred books and 
gone its several ways. Yet, even now, some 
great branch of the Christian Church might con- 
ceivably drop out Second Peter, either because 
of its contents or its authorship ; and the dis- 
covery in some Red Sea monastery of a lost 
Epistle beyond any question written by St. Paul 
might bring divided Christendom together again 
for one hour while it reopened the canon. 

The process of determining the canon has 
been all along a separation of temporary from 
permanent elements. That separation is still a 
guiding principle in determining the use we 
shall make of the revelation and the value of its 



50 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

several parts. We have not yet begun to realize 
or to apply the significance of a sacred volume 
whose true contents have been determined by the 
wisdom of history. " History" ** historical " are 
found to be words and processes deserving our 
reverence. The illumination which comes to 
our religion from a book historically written and 
historically determined, is like that we feel when 
we learn that the Church is a Church of History, 
and did not spring into being apart from the 
needs and the gifts of men. It is akin to the 
supreme satisfaction felt by our Intellect and 
manhood in the discovery of this present age 
that the majestic order of the universe has been 
and Is ever unfolding progressively, was not 
created In Its final form by a single fiat, and the 
key to this awakening discovery Is the survival 
of the permanent, the elimination of the tempo- 
rary. As a boy, I thought, partisanlike as we all 
are In youth, that a word was either Inspired or 
not Inspired, and If pronounced Inspired the sub- 
ject was closed ; that you read from the Book of 
Wisdom on all Saints Day at your peril, since it 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 5 I 

only belonged In the Apocrypha. God's voice, 
I have come to learn, may be there though the 
Church's judgment leaves the book as a whole 
outside the sacred volume. 

Do we open the way, by such considerations, 
for hopeless uncertainty and confusion ? Only 
to souls lacking the courage of their birthright, 
false to the principles which guided the fathers 
In determining and handing on the revealed 
word. We awake rather to the consciousness 
that the decisions by which we have our present 
Scriptures were the result of most careful and 
painstaking separation of material, and that the 
practical unanimity on all the books of value 
gives us a treasure assured beyond question. 
Wisdom and piety did not cease with one age. 
The Holy Spirit has not deserted His Church. 
The study of the canon summons to a coura- 
geous faith. The call to sift out the temporary 
that the permanent may abide Is a witness to 
belief In a living Lord. 

HI. By this study, we discover that the ques- 
tion of canoniclty Is of greater relative importance 



52 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

than that of Inspiration. The inspiration of the 
Bible is no longer, as was once held, its primary 
mark. Inspiration is still to be affirmed of the 
Bible, an exceptional inspiration for an excep- 
tional purpose. Yet we no longer regard 
inspiration as confined to the Bible, nor the one 
determining feature by which its books were 
included in a sacred collection. The man is 
inspired and not the books, and his inspiration 
is recognized by enlightened Christian respon- 
siveness. *' When God wished to give the 
Decalogue to Israel, He did not write with His 
finger on tables of stone ; He raised up Moses, 
and from the consciousness of Moses the Deca- 
logue sprang. In order that we might have the 
Epistle to the Romans, there was no need to 
dictate It to the Apostle ; God had only to create 
the powerful Individuality of Saul of Tarsus, 
well knowing that when once the tree was made 
the fruit would follow in due course. The same 
with the Gospel ; He did not drop it from the 
sky ; He did not send it by an angel ; He caused 
Jesus to be born from the very bosom of the 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 53 

human race, and Jesus gave us the Gospel that 
had blossomed in His inmost heart." * The 
man is not lost in his inspiration. He uses his 
natural and acquired powers to clothe the mes- 
sage that has been given him. It is for that 
message the ear of man is listening, to recognize 
it if he can, and to receive messenger and mes- 
sage from God Himself. 

It is now universally admitted that the indi- 
vidual style is not destroyed by the inspiration. 
As better or worse, as hiding or helping the 
message, what is for all time is to be disen- 
tangled from the style, which is that of the man 
and the day. " With whatever inspiration God 
has endowed men," writes Sabatier, "that inspir- 
ation has always passed through human subjec- 
tivity ; it has only been able either to express or 
to translate itself in the language and the turn 
of mind of a particular individual and of a par- 
ticular time. Now, no individual and historical 
form can be absolute. If the contents are 



* Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 57. 



54 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

divine, the vessel is always earthern. The organ 
of the revelation of God necessarily limits it."* 

The literary style of the Bible writers is not 
given to the race as itself marked with divine 
approval. That literary style must be under- 
stood and translated as well as the language. 
The writer must be made to speak in a manner 
agreeable to another day. All the literature of 
the New Testament, as well as that of the Old, 
is written with a purpose. The writing is colored 
by that purpose. That purpose is good, but in 
a measure personal to himself, and so incidental 
and temporary. The study of the purpose of 
each of the four Evangelists is a commonplace 
of translation for intelligent Bible classes. This 
personal element is necessary in any revelation. 
There is no such thing as an abstract, universal, 
unrelated style, as a scheme of writing for all 
races and ages on the face of the Heavens. Yet 
this personal element must be treated, so far as 
it affects the message, as a temporary feature. 



* Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 6i. 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 55 

The obscure passages must all be not only 
explained, but as they offend and hinder must 
be omitted. Christian readers will have favorite 
writers and favorite books ; will pass over alto- 
gether considerable portions of the written reve- 
lation. The Christian Church will claim the 
right to omit certain verses or paragraphs in 
public or devotional reading. 

In the Izturgual ViS,& of the Bible this principle 
of separation between permanent and temporary, 
this consciousness that inspiration does not 
extend to all alike, takes on a very practical and 
persuasive form. 

The principle has been long acknowledged In 
a timid fashion. There Is a hesitancy to apply 
it more fully or to confess our recognition of It, 
because of archaic and ignorant conceptions of 
the very nature and method of God's revelation. 
It is a mistaken view of the Bible that requires 
any passage either to be used as a whole in 
public worship or not to be used at all. The 
feeling Is not properly described as reverence for 
God's word ; it is an unintelligent treatment of 



56 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

its human and therefore its passing elements. 
Modifications in liturgical use come slow, and 
properly so because of our attachment to the 
prized devotional forms of generations. We 
shall continue to read of the Three Heavenly 
Witnesses in the Epistle for the First Sunday 
after Easter, part of the Prayer Book, long after 
we have omitted it from the lectionary as a 
lesson from the Bible for Trinity Sunday even- 
ing. It will sometime go from the Epistle, being 
not a part, as it there claims, of I John v. So 
the Commandments, in the Ante Communion 
Service will, I am sure, be heard by our children 
one sentence only for each Commandment. We 
shall omit, in liturgical use, clauses suited only 
for the conditions of their original utterance, 
found notably in the Fourth Commandment, and 
clearly enough in the Fifth and Tenth. God's 
permanent message will be the one clause, 
" Remember the Lord's Day to keep it holy"; 
"Honor thy father and thy mother"; "Thou 
shalt not covet " ; and the people can answer 
with a ready heart, " Lord, have mercy upon us, 



IN A WRITTEN RE VELA TION 5 7 

and incline our hearts to keep this law." In the 
burial chapter there are verses which either from 
their obscurity or their harshness mar the effec- 
tiveness of an otherwise well-nigh perfect word 
of comfort from God. Baptism for the dead 
requires explanation not suited to the hour of 
sorrow. '' Let us eat and drink for to-morrow 
we die " ; " Evil communications corrupt good 
manners," the cry of the Epicurean, the warn- 
ing to the dissolute, are jarring words In the 
house of mourning. We retain these verses 
solely from an obsolescent loyalty to Scripture 
as a whole^ from failure to apply the winnowing 
principle that edification Is found In the per- 
manent alone, archaic interest only in the tem- 
porary. In the Psalter, where the use of Scrip- 
ture Is emphatically devotional rather than 
instructive, the appointment or the permission 
of Selections of Psalms has long recognized 
a permanent out from a passing religious value. 
In this usage, the Church of Rome, following 
the earlier church, has been wiser than the re- 
formed Church of England. Our own Church, 



58 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

by introducing Selections and increasing their 
number, has come into line with a generous 
Catholicity. We have not yet dared to apply 
the principle to verses of individual Psalms, 
omitting such as are of passing or questionable 
moral character, as in the 69th Psalm appointed 
for Good Friday. The structural character of 
many Psalms introduces a denunciatory element 
as a sort of background for the larger vision and 
more devout trust. Such dark contrasts, such 
separateness of the chosen people from the con- 
demned and hated, however necessary to keep 
faith and goodness alive, does not belong to the 
permanent Christianity of the Gospel. No per- 
missive selection will be adapted to popular use, 
which does not print the selected Psalms by 
themselves. No congregation will read six 
verses only of Psalm 31, as is permitted in the 
Second Selection, until those verses are printed 
apart. I doubt if any of you have ever heard 
the psalm so used. The time will come when 
such psalms and portions of psalms only will be 
printed in the Prayer Book for devotional use, 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 59 

as the church in its wisdom has pronounced edi- 
fying. Then we can read the noble 139th psahii, 
*' O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known 
me," without offending the sensitive Christian 
conscience by compelHng a congregation to read 
verses 19 — 22, ''Wilt thou not slay the wicked, 
O God ... I hate them right sore." 

The mind of the Church is manifested In this 
increasing use of selections and in changes ap- 
proved and demanded in the lectionary. There 
is going to be a still more marked and courage- 
ous application of the distinction between what 
is temporary and what is of permanent value in 
the written Word. " In the Prayer Book of 
Edward VI ", we quote a recent article from the 
Spectator, " we find the privilege asserted with 
delightful frankness : ' The Old Testament is 
appointed for the First Lessons at Matins and 
Even Song, and shall be read through every 
year once, except certain books and chapters 
which be least edifying and might best be spared, 
and therefore are left unread. The New Testa- 
ment is appointed for the Second Lessons at 



6o THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Matins and Even Song, and shall be read over 
orderly every year thrice ; except the Apocalypse, 
out of which there can be only certain Lessons 
appointed upon divers proper Feasts' — The laity 
of 1904 are not children, whose reading must be 
supervised by the Church. No man is bound to 
wrest his conscience into harmony with a moral- 
ity incompatible with the teaching of Christ ; but 
what thinking Christian does not think himself 
so bound ? The exercise of the moral judgment 
is a wholesome exercise. * Why even of your- 
selves judge ye not what is right ', said Christ ". 
IV. The distinction between temporary and 
permanent is thus seen to apply to a written re- 
velation in that it is first written and then edited. 
Men have composed it, and men have put it 
together. In man's work, however guided by 
the Spirit of God, there are always of necessity 
human, that is perishable, elements. They are 
fitted to perish. They ought to perish. Man 
not only writes and collects the books of the 
Bible, man also mterprets what he has accepted 
as a word from God. As he uses he interprets. 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 6 1 

Our thought must be turned finally, as we con- 
sider the temporary and permanent In a written 
revelation, to the value of this principle in using 
and explaining the word. 

Are we ready to carry this principle to all 
parts of the Bible ? Have we the courage of 
our conscientious discovery ? Are apostles 
limited by conditions of their time and know- 
ledge and use of language as well as patriarchs 
and priests, writers of psalm and prophecy ? Is 
even the written record of what Jesus our Lord 
said and did when on earth to be subjected to 
the same separating process. His permanent 
message for man's salvation emerging from His 
word of passing phrase and application, He 
Himself standing forth as He Is for all time out 
from what He said and did when Incarnate 
among a local people and in a time of peculiar 
limitations? In this lecture we can but seek to 
learn whether the principle Is universally true, 
reserving its application, to details of Christ's 
person and words and of apostolic teaching, to 
later lectures. We may well hesitate as we 



62 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

approach the inner sanctuary of our reHgion, 
may rigorously subject intellectual processes to 
spiritual tests. But if our principle is a true and 
saving principle, we will be courageous in its 
application under the guidance of the same 
Spirit. Men destined to occupy places of 
counsel and construction in the Christian 
Church must be ready to move, with reverent 
but firm step, along paths where the light has 
already shined to make truth more plain. The 
mass of Christian people must be gently and 
helpfully led by those whose duty and privilege 
it is to tally action more and more with truth. 

Let us look once again at our Bible, our writ- 
tefl word, our New Testament, with a readiness 
to deal with the whole of it in the way which 
God has shown and still shows a written word 
demands. In this further look our thought is 
chiefly on how to interpret the word. 

So looking we find \\\.2X freedom in the use of 
the Book is not only the warrant of reason but 
the practice of devout men of God. 

I. Every sacred book, be it Old Testament 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 63 

or New, be it Gospel or Epistle, — a human 
thing written in a language and with a style — 
every book has a parentage partly earthly, partly 
heavenly. 

The earthly must gradually be put In the 
background, be. In the processes of transla- 
tion Into language and Into life, so subordinated 
as to well nigh disappear, save as drapery. Not 
merely must we give up in our Bibles as of per- 
manent obligation such crude conceptions of a 
preparatory dispensation as the destruction of 
the Canaanites and the imprecatory Psalms, on 
moral grounds ; such false notions of date and 
authorship as have been tacked on to books and 
chapters by an unscholarly age, and made the 
test of a rising or falling religion, on critical 
grounds ; but certain accepted Interpretations, 
certain treasured Christian doctrines, founded, 
at least In phraseology, on temporary, fleeting 
and unworthy conceptions, must go too as partak- 
ing of the earthly element. However inter- 
woven as part and parcel of a cherished scheme 
of salvation, however deemed essential to my 



64 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

own faith as that by which I mounted, their 
value for all men and all time must be freely- 
questioned and rejected if found wanting. 
Christ boldly threw aside such of the Old Testa- 
ment as was un-Christian in fulfilling the law, 
did away with the perishing elements, pro- 
nounced, with His "but I say unto you," distinct 
condemnation on what Moses had said to them 
of old time. So the Christian must discard, 
under guidance of the Spirit, whatever of the 
New Testament is un-Christian. The New 
Testament writers themselves manifested a 
courage we may well emulate as they broke 
away from what they had been trained to revere. 
Some grave clothes of a dead faith still cling 
about their Christianity. " The primitive 
Gospel is not In its form, but only In Its spirit, 
the Everlasting Gospel." * The Religion of a 
Book must use Its book as a book. What Is 
more sacred to a people than a written constitu- 
tion ? In its interpretation changes pass with 



* James Martineau. 



IN A WRITTEN RE VELA TION 6$ 

each age, adapting Its words to conditions, till, 
while the principle survives, external action may 
quite contravene its letter. We are told that 
Japan has both an unwritten constitution like 
England and a written constitution like America, 
the latter interpreting the former for the necessi- 
ties of each age.* 

2. The use of the Old Testament by New 
Testament writers, by the early Christians, by 
Christ Himself, exhibits this freedom of inter- 
pretation which is a distinct even if unavowed 
separation and retention of a permanent value, 
quite apart from the literal and primary mean- 
ing of the passage in hand. Reverenced as the 
Old Testament was by the Jews and early 
Christians, perhaps beyond any feeling enter- 
tained at present for the whole Bible, such 
reverence permitted the freest treatment of the 
material. We have hardly begun to study, 
much less to realize and approve, the methods 
adopted by Christ and Apostolic men in dealing 



*Baron Kantaro, Century, July, 1904. 



^6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

with their word of God. Their treatment of 
the text of the Old Testament Scriptures, now 
as literal, now as allegorical, now as a motto or 
only a catch word, has yet to be systematically 
studied and made the basis for a like fearless- 
ness linked with a riper discernment. We may 
neither praise nor follow their example till we 
have caught some of the exaltation that found 
such truth and value in the old written word. 

So Jesus uses His Scriptures. He quotes 
their poetry as illustration ; their devotional 
language to strengthen Himself in the presence 
of trial ; their literary and historic treasure to 
defend His own claims and to answer His 
adversaries. He found comfort in His inherited 
familiarity with their language. He took grate- 
ful refuge, as did the men of His time, and as 
do the men of the Orient to-day, in the phrase, 
'* It is written." Yet at His touch that written 
word glowed with new and unsuspected power. 
He passes by with disapproval the unfit ; He 
lifts to spiritual levels the morally neutral ; He 
retains, uses, hands on, the serviceable in that 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 6/ 

written word. He cherished while he criticised 
that sacred Hterature which as a whole had 
made for righteousness ; and drew distinctions 
between Moses' legislation for the hardness of 
men's hearts and the visions of David and 
Isaiah, whose Scripture was at His coming 
fulfilled in the hearers' ears. Sharing, as He 
did, the reverence of an early age for the mys- 
tery of written words, He handled those written 
words as symbols of invisible realities."^ Later 
Christian interpreters, even St. Paul himself, as 
the mystical in him was under less restraint, 
carried this free handling of Scripture to an 
extreme which empties the word of all its 
original significance. 

We may not wisely make these allegorizing 
methods our own, save in secondary and illus- 
trative ways. The abuse of the original text to 
serve as heading for anything one wants to 
preach brings into discredit the use of any text 



* Hatch. Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian 
Church. Lecture III. 

Peters. Old Testament and New Scholarship, 57 ffg. 



68 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

at all — let not the preacher bolster his vagaries 
by a pretended and traditional Scriptural sup- 
port. We may not treat the written Scripture 
as Paul treated the Scripture of his reverence, 
or as the Master treated the written word of 
them of old time, because of change in literary 
attitude and critical conception. But we may 
dare use as much freedom as they in dealing 
with a word which is seen by us even more 
clearly to be mingled with error. There is no 
revelation from God how to use His word. 
Inspired men are seen using the inspired word 
with the freedom of sons. God is founds in His 
word, speaking with manifold voices, after mani- 
fold fashions. The message that is to last is 
heard dimly at first, coming out more clear from 
the confusion of temporary voices and methods 
of speech. The vision seen of a prophet with 
his spiritual eye, yet inadequately portrayed ; 
the voice of God heard by an apostle with his 
inward ear, but recorded in hestitating and 
obscure language — these the listening heart 
must recover for itself, rescuing the eternal from 
out the perishing. 



IN A WRITTEN RE VELA TION 69 

God blesses the unintelligent, even the super- 
stitious use of Scripture, not because it is unin- 
telligent, but because of its spiritual eagerness. 
In blessing. He looks at the heart. But a man 
cannot plead a right purpose of heart if he is 
playing false to the conviction of the head. A 
man cannot plead for his Scriptural methods the 
excuse of ignorance if in the rest of his intel- 
lectual life he has passed on to the stage of 
enlightment. Nor may any Christian dare deny 
the value of progress, of civilization, of fuller 
truth, despite the difficulties such progress 
entails ; nor refuse to apply their discoveries to 
his greatest treasure, the Holy Bible. 

We are at least attaining to a less fragmen- 
tary view of the Scriptures. We are finding 
their message, not in detailed prophecy fulfilled, 
but in a divine purpose pervading the whole 
record and surviving its incompleteness. We 
no longer bulwark some cruel theological propo- 
sition by a proof text wrested from its context 
in the book of Ecclesiastes. Harmonists are 
not needed to save the faith by reconciling con- 



70 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

tradictions in Gospel narratives. We are not 
troubled that one of the synoptists was mis- 
taken in detail of time or place. Such ignorance 
or error was part of the temporary method of a 
gospel given at first orally or catechetically, of 
the impression made on different hearers and 
varying responsiveness. Crystallized into writ- 
ing the errors stand out conspicuous, yet they 
have no importance for him who is listening for 
the voice of the Master whom the narrative 
enshrines. 

V. Told all these things and believing them ; 
told that the creation stories of the Old Testa- 
ment are ancient myths purified ; that the patri- 
archs were not persons ; that much of the law 
was ascribed to Moses from later days; that Old 
Testament history was written for his own pur- 
pose, now by a prophet, now by a priest ; that 
there are questionable books in the canon, that 
many books are not authentic, that Bible writers 
were mistaken ; that even Jesus' words have 
been worked over, consciously or unconsciously, 
by the Evangelists — what, we ask, in cumulative 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 71 

alarm, what remains of God s word for God's 
people ? 

Let me tell you what remains, with a confi- 
dence not in the details of my answer, but in its 
larger accuracy. What remains as the message 
of the Holy Bible? 

The sacred story of beginnings ; set In a 
frame work of phraseology and figure universal 
among early peoples, but freed from all gross- 
ness, touched with an indescribable moral and 
religious power ; a marvelous picture of great 
moral experiences, as in the story of Cain and 
Abel — man's responsibility for his fellow, no 
escape from God or from conscience. 

Abraham, the embodiment of the Jewish ideal 
of manhood ; an historical background but 
gathering to himself besides the noble deeds 
and traits of centuries ; no less real because 
Idealized, as Arthur is no less England's hero 
than Alfred. 

Figure after figure growing plainer and more 
human, with the keen interest of biography, not 
fearful of infirmities in their portrayal ; figures 



y2 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

to look at and gauge one's self by, and hear 
God speaking with His children — Jacob and 
Joseph and Joshua, David and Job and Isaiah. 

Moses, founder of a nation, creator of a 
people out of separated and suspicious tribes, 
the motive power of the union a religious one. 

That religion kept alive through dark and 
reactionary times, a trust for the world, the reli- 
gion of one, holy God. 

Aspiration and communion by psalmists sing- 
ing human needs and human hopes, in words 
unequaled and inimitable, as true an expression 
of man's faith and trust when he looks up to 
God to-day as when uttered two thousand years 
ago. 

Facing, by men of thought and life-discipline, 
of hard questions answered after varied fashions, 
in the Wisdom literature of Proverbs, Ecclesl- 
astes, and Job. 

Witnesses for righteousness before tyranny 
and lust by the prophets, men and messengers 
of God. 

The words of the Master such as never man 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 73 

Spake; the life of the Incarnate without confes- 
sion of sin or recall of act ; the sacred Figure 
moving among men in time, centering the gaze 
of the ages. 

Simple peasants and fishermen becoming 
saints of the world ; a Jew of provincial Tarsus 
setting his eye on Rome to conquer her for 
Christ ; known, remembered, listened to where 
voices of the poets and scholars of their time are 
long forgotten. 

The record of all this our inspiration, comfort, 
wonder, joy ; the Holy Scriptures ; the Word of 
God. 

That is what is left. Do we want something 
more, something better? Do we want author- 
ship proved, prose in place of poetry, scientific 
facts, a narrative finished but barren and power- 
less ? Do we want any other treasure than that 
we have, to be cherished, to be studied, to dis- 
cover its gold from the necessary and preserving 
elements of alloy ? 

We pass, with the next two lectures, into the 
heart of our subject, the contents of the New 



74 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Testament Revelation : in one lecture the person 
of Christ, the temporary and permanent inci- 
dent to an incarnation ; in another the teachings 
of Christ, the temporary clothing, in methods of 
expression, in current association of ideas, of 
eternal truth. Let us pray for grace to discover 
and to recognize the Son of the Father in Jesus 
of Nazareth, the eternal Word in the words 
spoken. 

^A. ^fe ^te ^Is ^A. 

The eloquent passage in the peroration of 
Dean Milman's Latin Christianity, quoted by 
Robert Edward Bartlett in his Bampton lectures 
may be fittingly appended to this lecture. 
'' What distinctions of conception, what precision 
of language may be indispensable to true faith ; 
what part of the ancient dogmatic system may 
be allowed silently to fall into disuse, as at least 
superfluous, and as beyond the range of human 
thought and human language ; how far the 
sacred records may, without real peril to their 
truth, be subjected to closer investigation ; to 
what wider interpretation, especially of the 
Semitic portion, those records may submit, and 
wisely submit, in order to harmonize them with 



IN A WRITTEN REVELATION 75 

the Irrefutable conclusions of science ; how far 
the Eastern vale of allegory which hangs over 
their truth may be lifted or torn away to show 
their unshadowed essence ; how far the poetic 
vehicle through which truth Is conveyed may be 
gently severed from the truth ; — all this must be 
left to the future historian of our religion. As 
It is my own confident belief that the words of 
Christ, and His words alone, shall not pass 
away ; so I cannot presume to say that men may 
not attain to a clearer, at the same time more 
full and comprehensive and balanced sense of 
those words, than has as yet been generally 
received In the Christian world." * 



* Bartlett. The Letter and the Spirit, 204. 



LECTURE III. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN THE 

INCARNATION. 

The Man is behind the Book : the Man of 
whom the Book is record ; the longing that He 
come, the need for Him, His appearance in the 
flesh, the witness to Him of the Apostles and 
the newborn church. The Incarnate One, the 
Word made Flesh, shares the characteristics of 
the Written Word In that He needs translation 
and interpretation. His permanent Person to be 
discovered for man out from its temporary vesti- 
ture. 

I. The Incarnation is becoming the concenter- 
ing fact of Christian thought and hope. In the 
Incarnation man is brought face to face with his 
God for cleansing and for inspiration. God is 
seen in Jesus Christ. 

The historical and the spiritual, the human 
and the divine are brought together in one em- 



IN THE INCARNA TION 77 

bodlment in the Incarnation. For permanent 
value to man they must be separated anew, at 
least in thought. 

Jesus Christ lived at a certain time, in a certain 
place, of a certain people. The Incarnation was, 
and must be, an appearing in a specific human 
nature. Very man must be individual man as 
well, if he be real man. " As empirical the per- 
son is a unit ; as transcendental he belongs to a 
whole, and thinks in the terms of the universal. 
As empirical he is a creature of time and space, 
comes of a given race, is born at a given time in 
a given place to a given family, inherits a given 
past, is fashioned by a given present, and is a 
factor of a given future ; but as transcendental, 
his affinities are all with the eternal, and all his 
work Is for It."* Race, family, place, time, edu- 
cation and opportunity are essential factors in 
the life of the natural man. If the supernatural 
be also represented in him, it is through the con- 
flict of these two views of the one person ** that 



* Fairbairn. Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 
308, 311. 



78 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

the simple story of a humble and beautiful life 
is turned into the supreme drama of history." 

That union of the historical and spiritual, of 
the human and divine in the Incarnation, is both 
its glory and its difficulty. It summons to dis- 
crimination. The result of that discrimination 
is man's greatest treasure. 

Just because of that in the Incarnation which 
makes it the revelation to man of God's nature 
and of God's way of salvation, namely, the touch 
on man himself of the divine, must it also wrap 
up that divine within human folds. By these 
perceptible, perishable garments the divine is 
discovered, made our own. The divine is re- 
tained and held on to as its several human gar- 
ments are allowed for and ignored. So the 
drapery of a parable, furnishing its attraction 
for the reader, forms no parts of its lesson. 

Jesus : a son of Judah, a son of Mary, a son 
of Nazareth, a son of the First Century : in all 
these found to be Son of God. These appar- 
ent relationships do not exhaust what He was, 
yet with these we must begin. Christianity is 



IN THE INCARNATION 79 

first a child of its age ; so much the more note- 
worthy its differences from its age. It inherited 
temporary and unworthy traditions ; it was in 
danger of crystalHzing some of these into per- 
manency ; perhaps some have been crystalHzed 
and need resifting. The Master, too, was hu- 
man, '' and with the divine intuitions of his mind 
were inevitably mingled undivine traditions of 
his country and his time." * 

The ever fresh problem for Christian study, 
the characteristic problem of Christianity as 
God's fullest revelation of Himself, is this union 
of the historical and the spiritual. Does the 
Incarnation detract from or add to the value of 
Christianity as a religion for man ? Have we 
something in the Word made Flesh to explain 
away or to rejoice over? Why! it is the fact 
and truth that gives Christianity at once its 
beauty and its power. That the difficulties 
involved summon to exercise the high faculty of 
discrimination is tribute to the nature of man 



* Martineau. Seat of Authority in Religion. 325. 



8o THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

for whose salvation the Son of God took that 
nature as His own. Answering this question as 
we must answer it, that the Incarnation is the 
glorious truth of our Christian faith, though it 
involve things hard to receive and hard to 
explain, we must accept its conditions and 
address ourselves to their solution. 

The Christ of history becomes for each of us 
the Christ of experience, both of them the 
expression of God's love seen in the face of 
His dear Son. The Kerr lectures for 1897, 
delivered by Dr. David W. Forrest, bear title, 
The Christ of History and of Experience. At 
the outset the apparent inconsistency is strongly 
put between an immediate realization of Christ's 
presence In the soul and a faith requiring 
intellectual appreciation of an historic person. 
*' Religion, It is said, Is a spiritual experience, 
the right relation of the soul to God ; and yet, 
this right relation Is made dependent on the 
belief of what took place hundreds of years 
ago." The reconciliation of this apparent incon- 
sistency is at once the problem and the power of 



IN THE INCARNATION 8 1 

the Christian rehgion. In his eighth lecture, 
The Relation of the Spiritual to the Historical 
In Christian Faith, Dr. Forrest puts their recon- 
ciliation as not incongruous, but characteristic 
of all man's highest acts. Outward testimony 
and inward sight must always go together for 
any complete moral work in man. '' Historical 
belief Is a constant factor in determining all our 
ideas of duty." Man's beliefs and resolves ** are 
determined very largely by the attitude which 
he assumes towards persons and incidents of 
bygone times, of whose reality he is convinced 
through the witness of others." The soul long- 
ing for deliverance and fellowship with God may 
say. Just the message I need is the story of one 
who lived a stainless life, gave that life in others' 
behalf, rose from the dead, ever liveth to give 
forgiveness and renewal to those who give them- 
selves to Him. " How can I be sure that Jesus 
Christ was actually such a one? A link is want- 
ing to unite the historic Jesus and the Church's 
interpretation of Him. The Gospels are that 
linkr The Gospels give us a picture that, with 



82 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

all our questioning and wonder, is its own best 
argument. It is of *' a humanity which tran- 
scends itself and yet remains human." This 
is no dream of the idealist, no fiction of the 
philosopher. It is the Figure of our hope and 
of our need. It is this fact on which experience 
may fasten, this blending of the outward and the 
inward, which is Christianity's unique and tran- 
scendent gift. *' It is exactly this direct touch 
with the historical Jesus which the simplest 
Christian knows to lie at the root of his confi- 
dence. There are times when his own experi- 
ence of Christ's presence seems to falter, and 
when even the testimony of Christian hearts and 
lives around him fails to reassure him. He is 
haunted by the fear that they, like himself, may 
be swayed too much by moods and fond imagin- 
ings, and he is only restored by the sense of 
an indubitably real Christ speaking to him out 
of the Gospels." * That historic Master, the 



* Forrest. The Christ of History and of Experience. 
Chap. VIII, passim. 



IN THE INCARNATION 83 

incarnate Son of God, is to be seen, is to be 
heard as Master and Teacher for to-day through 
a translating medium which shall eliminate the 
passing to retain the abiding features. 

We must then read and study the story of the 
Incarnation. We must not come to it with a 
prior conception of what the Incarnate God 
ought to be. " It is as illegitimate to argue that 
He must have observed common prayer because 
He was a man, as that He must have known 
the day and hour of the last judgment because 
He was the Son of God. The doctrine of the 
Incarnation is essentially an induction from 
facts." * These facts must be known and weighed 
quite apart from any abstract notions. If God 
and man were in union it was an unique phenome- 
non, one for whose manifestations no other 
experience has prepared us. We must read the 
story and draw for ourselves the new picture it 
gives us. Jesus Christ of the Gospels must tell 
us what God is like. 



* Forrest. The Christ of History and of Experience, 
481. 



84 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

As the Figure grows clearer, as the concept of 
God becomes more defined, our appreciative 
intelligence must allow for and drop off the 
inevitable human accessories of God incarnate. 

This eliminating process must not be too sud- 
den, or too radical, losing for us the historical 
Jesus altogether. We spin our fancies about a 
divine being, then open our Bibles to find Him 
much more like ourselves. A pious bishop of 
the Middle Ages prayed earnestly that it might 
be revealed to him what Jesus did in His boy- 
hood. Then the bishop dreamed a dream. He 
saw a carpenter at his work and a boy helping 
him. Then the mother set porridge on the 
table and bade them eat. And the bishop was 
watching behind the door. Then said the boy, 
** Shall not the man also eat with us ? " A truer 
revelation of the divine character this than 
invented infancy-miracles and aureolas. 

Yet the recorded story, while it reveals, does 
not exhaust His nature. Else were Christianity 
local, the religion of an oriental master. The 
Church has been entrusted by the records of the 



IN THE INCARNATION 85 

Gospel with a Message and a Lord of much 
larger embrace than its first reading or interpre- 
tation realized. Jesus is not limited by the race 
and age to which He was born. All other 
saints and sages, marked with characteristics 
their own admire, are objects of aversion or 
disapproval to peoples of alien training. " Jesus 
is the only oriental that the Occident has admired 
with an admiration that has become worship. 
His is the only name the West has carried into 
the East which the East has received and praised 
and loved with sincerity and without qualifica- 
tion."* ** It is easy," writes Bartlett in his 
Bampton lectures, "to assign too much impor- 
tance to the temporary element in the Christian 
Gospel. For, though Christ was called the Son 
of David, though He was descended from 
Jewish ancestors and brought up amid Jewish 
surroundings, yet He was in a far truer and 
more characteristic sense the Son of Man." f 



* Fairbairn. The Philosophy of the Christian Reli- 
gion, 369, 

f Bartlett. The Letter and the Spirit, "^d. 



86 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

The divine Christ emerges from the picture, 
naturally, surely, yet requiring the discerning mind 
not to read in Him as divine what were only neces- 
sary features of earth. The divine Christ is found 
within the historic Jesus. The study of the Chris- 
tian Ages is the Person of Christ : to make Him 
real, neither losing from our facts the historical, 
nor falsifying our ideal of the divine. There is 
danger on either hand. We cannot wisely read 
07ily the Synoptists with their picture of One 
who went about doing good, nor yet the Gospel 
of St. John with its proclamation of the Word 
made Flesh. If the one is the primer and the 
other the advanced text-book of the Story of 
Jesus Christ, we need to read His story again 
and again as children to make real our concep- 
tion as philosophers. 

It may be asked. How far is it possible to 
rescue the permanent, considering the fragmen- 
tary nature of the material of the Gospels ? 
They are not a full and orderly presentation of 
the life of Jesus Christ ; they are rather collec- 
tions of His sayings and His doings made with 



IN THE INCARNA TION. 8/ 

a purpose, either catechetical for Christian life, 
or demonstrative for Christian faith. Yet in 
their very simplicity and honesty they have been 
found wonderfully effective in the portrayal of 
their matchless Figure. They have proved capa- 
ble of adaptation to the comprehension and 
needs of all sorts and conditions of men, of races 
of every training and attainment. The mission- 
ary to our own churchless and Christless fellow- 
citizens, as to the heathen in all stages of 
ignorance and sin, has a like task to that unto 
which we are addressing ourselves, to discover 
and make real from the story of Jesus in the old 
Gospels the divine Christ, Master and Lord for 
all the world. The task, to be complete, re- 
quires both scholarship and devoutness, each of 
them open-minded. We must fall back at last 
for satisfaction over our conclusions, as in all 
other processes Involving moral assurance, on 
the inner witness. This is only to say under 
another form that a man must be a good man if 
he would know God. If a son of peace be there 
Christ's peace shall rest upon him. 



88 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

II. These considerations — the Incarnate God 
appearing in time and place, His story told in a 
record human like His own manifestation — have 
both a theological and a practical bearing. 

I. Theological. The temporary conditions 
of the Incarnation influence our thinking, our 
theological conception of Christ. 

Whatever our attitude may be toward what is 
technically known as the Kenosis, Christian 
Theology must hold certain positions having an 
affinity with the kenotic idea. In some sense, 
Christ in the Incarnation " emptied Himself," in 
part or for a time, of attributes or activities be- 
longing to His unveiled divinity. We are wiser 
to hold on to th.^ principle of some such laying 
aside of powers, the necessity thereof involved 
in the very fact of God becoming truly man, the 
comfort and the help to our humanity in such 
condescension, than to try to dogmatize on its 
corollaries. 

Some temporary features of an incarnation 
may be affirmed in general as unquestionably 
true. These have a deep effect on our thinking 



IN THE INCARNA TION 89 

as we face the fact of God Incarnate, though 
our minds be unable to follow to the end all 
which they involve. The divinity of Christ must 
be championed as a reality rather than as a 
notion ; as it lifts the level of our living and as- 
piration more than because it furnishes some- 
thing to argue for. 

First : The Incarnate Christ laid aside the 
metaphysical attributes of the divine nature. 

When we look at Christ, read His story, see 
His life, we see divinity, but we see it shorn of 
omnipresence, omnipotence, eternity. We see 
it with what may be called the essential attri- 
butes at least put in the background. 

Man looking at God, looking for God, must 
look with human eyes, must approach divinity 
from the man-side, as He is pictured in the 
human Gospel story. Human eyes cannot see 
the all-mighty, cannot compass the omnipresent. 
Herein the very reason for the Incarnation. If 
God is to be known as a reality, He must mani- 
fest Himself to eye of sense. Eye of sense can- 
not behold the infinite. 



90 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Metaphysical attributes would not give God 
to man, never have revealed Him. They are 
abstractions, they cannot be made concrete to 
man's apprehension. Try to picture, to present, 
eternity. It cannot be done. The conception 
cannot be grasped. If grasped at all it is not 
valued, has no touch on man to change either 
his character or his ideas, leaves him wide-eyed 
and dumb. God must come out of eternity into 
time ; must leave omnipresence for locality ; 
must drop omnipotence for infancy and youth, 
for food and sleep. 

It is no miracle that God be everywhere, be 
invisible, hold all power in His hand — for God 
is spirit. The incarnate Jesus, by the very fact 
that the Word in Him became flesh ceases to 
exercise these essential attributes of the God- 
head. The incarnation is no assuming of a 
part on the stage of an artificial world ; it is a 
real entering into our human nature. 

This is not to deny God's essential attributes, 
nor even to fail in realizing that they belong to 
God as God. But their existence in Him is 



IN THE INCARNATION 9 1 

reached by a process of reasoning. They are 
truths deduced from what we see, are not charac- 
teristics seen in themselves. The articles of the 
Creed, so far as they are other than the affirma- 
tion of the facts of the Gospel story, are truths 
reached by intellectual struggle, conquered for 
itself, through a great process of elimination, by 
the faith of the Church. Each generation must 
in a measure repeat that process for its own 
soul life, must find the eternal God through His 
human revelation in Jesus. Else the Incarnation 
was only of value for the day of Jesus' human 
life. Else we in our day are willing and able to 
forego that approach to the knowledge of God 
found necessary through all the travail-pangs 
which preceded Christ's coming, and conquered 
for mankind through generations of struggle 
since His day. We are not willing to fail our 
part in victory won for truth by effort. We 
cannot find God, for ourselves, as a heritage 
bequeathed us ; can find Him only as the Son 
takes us, too, by the hand and leads us into His 
presence. To approach God by the Creed-side, 



92 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

to begin our knowledge of Him by the affirma- 
tions of the Creeds to which we compel our- 
selves to bow, is to miss the purpose of the 
Incarnation ; is to forswear for ourselves the 
duty laid upon man by his nature to reach truth 
eternal by hardness. 

Jesus Christ, in His Incarnation, revealed 
God apart from the metaphysical attributes 
which belong to our idea of Him as eternal. 

Second : Christ's knowledge was limited in 
the Incarnation. 

It is His own affirmation that there are facts 
He does not know, facts belonging only to the 
Father, not the Father's will that they be shared 
with His son in His day of earth. He becomes 
man in that He questions for information, that 
He marvels, that He is amazed, that He is 
troubled in spirit, that He hopes against hope. 
Once again, and earnestly, I repeat, these feel- 
ings are not assumed, any more than the human 
nature of Christ is assumed, as a dramatic spec- 
tacle. Men are not to be impressed by the life 
and death of Jesus Christ as they are impressed 



IN THE INCARNATION 93 

by a play, however tremendous may be the 
power of the stage. The Hfe of the Incarnate 
One, His feehngs, His pains, His hopes. His 
disappointments. His growth in mind and spirit- 
ual plans, are just as real as the experiences 
of any human life we know ; are just as real 
as is God's existence and God's wonderful 
nature ; are standards of reality for man as man 
looks, on the one part, at his wondrous self, on 
the other part at his God in whose image he has 
been made. 

It is no impeachment of Christ's divinity, see- 
ing that divinity had consented to tabernacle in 
the flesh, that He should not know what man 
can never know without study, without acquir- 
ing the knowledge. 

There is no evidence that Jesus knew higher 
mathematics or the existence of America, no 
reason why He should know these and like 
difficult questions either of reasoning or dis- 
covery, no methods by which He could properly 
become familiar with them. He contented Him- 
self with the scientific and secular attainment of 



94 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

His time. The concession of this fact would 
save Christian reading of the Gospels and Chris- 
tian interpretation of their difficulties from 
many an unnecessary and humiliating experi- 
ence. There is an unawareness to be allowed 
for in the Incarnate Christ which, while it helps 
to explain Him, constitutes, I may say, a nec- 
essary feature of His Incarnation and one that 
brings Him closer not only to our understand- 
ing, but to our sympathy. '* Not having come 
into the world to teach science, He contented 
Himself with the opinions He had inherited 
with the rest of His people, and which consti- 
tuted the science of nature of His little popular 
environment, without concerning Himself as to 
whether these opinions were erroneous or cor- 
rect." * 

It may help us both to believe and to value 
this concession of ignorance In the Incarnation, 
to remember that it Is in harmony with God's 
wisdom as we see it elsewhere. God never 



* Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 74-5 



IN THE INCARNATION 95 

gives a man without study the knowledge of 
facts and truths for whose acquisition He has 
endowed him with capacities. However su- 
premely necessary the knowledge of the Chinese 
language to the missionary, he must learn how 
to preach the Gospel in their own tongue to 
that people by years of painful application. 
What a converting power that a missionary 
should stand forth the first day of his coming 
and tell the story of Christ in a correct vernacu- 
lar ! It is not God's way, nor would it be wise 
to empty duty of hardship. Whatever the nature 
of the Gift of Tongues there is no evidence 
that the first Apostles were able in their mission- 
ary journeys to preach the Gospel to foreign 
peoples without an interpreter. In our reading 
of the Gospel to-day there are always alterna- 
tives of interpretation, one of which a man may 
take to his error. God does not compel either 
the acceptance or the appreciation of truth. He 
summons man to exercise freely, and to the 
utmost of his power, the gifts of acquisition and 
of discernment He has bestowed upon him. To 



9^ THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

hold that Jesus had a reserved knowledge of all 
facts and truths, a treasury of learning to draw 
upon which He had not Himself filled, a capac- 
ity to call out the mysteries of geography and 
history and natural science from a store-house 
of divinity, is to discredit God's wise way of 
educating His children, under plea of fancied 
loyalty to His Son sent into the world. 

The story of Jesus' life for the thirty years 
before His ministry, brief as Is the record, con- 
veys the unequivocal impression of a growth, a 
development. He increased in wisdom, as in 
stature. He came to Himself. He grew into 
self-consciousness by the gradual discipline and 
training of life, as well as by occasional marked 
and epochal experiences. The weekly service 
in the synagogue of the town where He had 
been brought up, the carpenter's bench and the 
lily-studded fields ministered to the growing 
realization of His mission as much as did the 
talk with the doctors In the temple at the age of 
twelve and the crowning baptism by Jordan at 
the age of thirty. What He knew of the text 



IN THE INCARNATION 9/ 

of the Old Testament, of the history of His peo- 
ple, He had to acquire by study. For the con- 
sciousness in the blossoming life from babyhood 
to manhood, that he was the Messiah of God, 
that He was the revealer of the divine will and 
sharer of the divine nature, He had to wait 
upon God with all His faculties alert to learn 
and to appropriate. He came to the realization 
of His divine nature and mission no otherwise 
than we learn what we are and what we are to 
do, by studying facts and mastering experiences 
within and without. He was a revelation first 
to Himself, then He revealed to mankind the 
wondrous things He had discovered. The Gos- 
pel did not drop from the sky, it was not sent 
by an angel ; Jesus was born from the very 
bosom of the human race, and Jesus gave us the 
Gospel that had blossomed in His inmost heart.* 
So every man, with a message and a mission, is 
first a self-discoverer, then a revealer to others. 
Strange how we admit this early ignorance and 



* Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 57. 



98 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

gradual self-discovery everywhere as a fact, and 
hesitate to use it as an interpretive principle ! 
It is the business of thoughtful Christian 
men to bring theories into harmony with 
facts, and so to make God's revelation more 
real. In the Incarnation Jesus was ignorant 
of much secular knowledge, learned as man 
learns, came to Himself even in His divine 
inheritance. 

But such a limitation in the knowledge of our 
Lord's human mind, inherent in the Incarnation, 
forms no hindrance to His moral unity with His 
Father. 

For, third : The Moral Attributes of God 
are undiminished in the Incarnation. 

From the first dawning of moral conscious- 
ness in Jesus there was a perfect harmony 
between His will and the will of His Father. 
That harmony with God is goodness : its per- 
fection is a partaking of that in the divine nature 
which alone marks God off as worthy of man's 
unstinted love and worship ; which alone, by 
contrast with gods many and lords many. 



IN THE INCARNATION' 99 

reveals Him as the Father of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, man's Heavenly Father, 
the Holy God. Union with God brings, is, 
holiness ; it is not necessarily scientific learning. 

There is no need that God's moral attributes 
be lost in the Incarnation, that they even be 
under eclipse from earth's standards of good- 
ness, or put out of sight for a time by earth's 
limitations. Goodness in man is just the same 
thing as goodness in God. It is harmony with 
God's will. That may appear at the earliest 
moment when that will is seen and known. In 
a being with whom such harmony has been the 
earliest possible choice goodness is not acquired 
by study. Christianity's secret is Christ's rela- 
tion to His Father. Christ's intellectual out- 
look is not ours ; ours may surpass His. 
Christ's religious outlook is eternal. In that 
religious realm, the harmony of holy will, God's 
essential and moral attributes meet ; perfection 
is possible in the Incarnation. 

The Sinlessness of Christ is our priceless 
treasure. In studying that we need no separa- 



lOO THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

tion between the temporary and the permanent. 
It is a positive, rather than a negative character- 
istic, best stated as moral perfection, an all- 
roundness in His Life. Individuals, nations, 
religionists stand for some one virtue; "the 
saints of the East would not be canonized in the 
West, while the qualities which the cultured West 
most admires the civilized East holds in dis- 
dainful contempt." * There is in Christ a bal- 
ance, a proportion, at once difficult to conceive, 
to portray, and certainly to reproduce. The 
Evangelists had before them the difficult task of 
portraying a Figure that had never before been 
conceived, uniting in Himself attributes hereto- 
fore held to be contradictory. They have suc- 
ceeded in picturing a simple and natural Person 
whom we at once recognize as a reality, yet all 
the time feel to be divine. 

There is in Christ, as we read the story of 
His life, no repentance, no confession in prayer, 
no haunting- doubts lest He has erred, no recall 



* Fairbairn. Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 
369- 352. 



IN THE INCARNATION 1 01 

of uttered judgments. There is forgiveness of 
others, with no conscious need that He be 
forgiven Himself. The impression is so unique 
and compelHng as to enlist the support of all 
apologists, Channing, Martineau, Bushnell, Bruce, 
as well as the most conventional champions of 
the faith. Bushnell's Tenth Chapter, ** The 
Character of Jesus forbids His possible Classifi- 
cation with Men " is still a present-day classic on 
the claims of the Incarnate One. *' Men under- 
take to be spiritual," I quote what is to me 
one of its most telling passages, *' and they be- 
come ascetic ; or, endeavoring to hold a liberal 
view of the comforts and pleasures of society, 
they are soon buried in the world, and slaves to 
its fashions ; or, holding a scrupulous watch to 
keep out every particular sin, they become 
legal, and fall out of liberty ; or, charmed with 
the noble and heavenly liberty, they run to 
negligence and irresponsible living ; so the 
earnest become violent, the fervent fanatical 
and censorious, the gentle waver, the firm turn 
bigots, the liberal grow lax, the benevolent, 



I02 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

ostentatious. Poor human infirmity can hold 
nothing steady — the character of Christ is never 
modified, even by a shade of rectification. It 
is one and the same throughout. He makes no 
improvement, prunes no extravagances, returns 
from no eccentricities. The balance of his char- 
acter is never disturbed, or readjusted, and the 
astounding assumption on which it is based is 
never shaken, even by a suspicion that he falters 
in it." * 

The virgin life is really the best evidence for 
the virgin birth. The question how Christ came 
into the world was a late one to be asked and 
answered, in the circle of early Christian be- 
lievers. St. Paul does not seem to have asked 
it at all. '* The Incarnation was for him a mira- 
culous fact, whatever its mode." On the pre- 
vailing disquietude over the virgin birth it may 
be said : that the stories of St. Matthew and St. 
Luke about Jesus' birth are a fitting presenta- 
tion of the origin of a sinless life ; that a miracle 



^ Bushnell. Nature and the Supernatural, 288. 



IN THE INCARNATION IO3 

in the moral world is as difficult to comprehend 
as a miracle in the physical world ; that new 
beings in God's creation demand new beginnings. 
For my own part, the story presents to me no 
exceptional or insurmountable difficulties. It 
has been felt, and gravely, that the virgin birth 
empties the Incarnation of vital significance and 
reality ; this may be pronounced a theological 
rather than a religious difficulty. Yet of the 
Incarnation, as of the Atonement and the In- 
spiration of the Scripture, we are safe in hold- 
ing that the fact is alone of supreme value, and 
the method of the fact secondary and specula- 
tive. The wisdom of the Church, by contrast 
with the sectarian spirit, has been not to dogma- 
tize on methods, at least not to enforce her 
theories ; rather to proclaim and to rejoice in 
the value of the facts of our religion. The fact 
of the Incarnation belongs to our permanent 
treasure of revelation ; the details of its method 
and manifestation partake of those temporary 
features which each age must read and translate 
anew for itself. 



104 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

These temporary, as contrasted with the 
permanent aspects of the Incarnation have also. 

2. A Practical Bearing, 

Our knowledge of God, our interpretation of 
His attitude toward man, our growth into His 
likeness, are all mediated through the Incarna- 
tion ; as is our ability to discover what is abiding 
in Him, and for ourselves, out of His temporary 
manifestation in the world of His Children. 

First : Our only satisfying knowledge of 
God is through Jesus Christ. "Jesus has for 
the Christian consciousness the religious value 
of God." If God be like Jesus then I can 
worship Him. Strip Jesus of the incidental and 
we have what we can embrace and love in God. 
" God is a spirit, and of what quality His spirit 
is the man Jesus declares. God is love, and 
what divine love means the ministry of Jesus 
in life and death shows. God is good in the 
specific sense of being gracious, generous, phil- 
anthropic, and the historic life of Jesus interprets 
for us the philanthropy of God. Knowledge of 
the historical Jesus is the foundation at once of 



IN THE INCARNATION I05 

a sound Christian theology and of a thoroughly 
healthy Christian life."* 

There is an unexpressed feeling of impatience 
that we cannot know God absolutely, cannot see 
goodness just as it is, apart from questions of 
money and clothes and food ; cannot empty it 
of all the accessories whereby it is explained 
and exemplified. We know nothing of good- 
ness apart from good persons ; that is why we 
may not lose personality from God. We have 
no idea of goodness outside of good actions, 
and good actions use the means at their dis- 
posal. The endeavor to relegate goodness to 
the invisible, to the realm of pure spirit, is land- 
ing many in oriental and theosophic religions 
whose impeachment is not so much that they 
are untrue philosophy as that they have no 
answer to the questions. What good have you 
done. How have men that believe in your system 
or live within its influence been made better. 
What have you contributed to bringing in the 
kingdom of righteousness ? 



* Bruce. Apologetics, 350. Also passim. 



I06 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

The religion of the Incarnate brings men into 
touch with a God of reality, a God whose char- 
acter they can feel, whose power they can make 
their own. The Incarnate Jesus is the point of 
contact between human weakness that would 
fain be better, and divine strength that is eager 
to impart itself. The Incarnate Jesus strips 
earthly terms of their perishable grossness, gives 
man a Father whose fatherhood is seen not in 
the mere fact of begetting but in the unfailing 
love and protecting care that has come to be the 
true Idea of fatherhood. 

In the Incarnation we find the apology for 
anthropomorphic language used in Scripture 
and in all religious utterance about God. If 
that God might be really known to man it were 
necessary that God take man's nature, wear 
man's clothes, eat man's food ; then is it equally 
fitting and necessary that God be spoken of in 
man's language. To him who is able to see it. 
He lifts the language, is not degraded by it ; 
even as He lifts the human form and makes 
it vehicle for the divine nature. 



IN THE INCARNATION 10/ 

Anthropomorphic language is the bugbear of 
much skeptical criticism of the Bible. If God is 
to be spoken about or written about at all, it 
must be in language of men. A supernatural 
revelation cannot give us a supernatural termi- 
nology for religious use, any more than it can 
give us an angel from heaven to be our minister, 
or bring God out of heaven to sit at our table. 
If it were possible it would be useless : " if they 
hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will 
they be persuaded, though one rose from the 
dead." Nor would it be wise : ** If God wished 
to make us a gift that we could receive, must 
He not have suited the form of it to that of our 
mind ? " All human language Is primarily 
material. This material language is put at 
once, under guidance of the imagination, at the 
service of poetry and legend. Through these 
God appears, speaking to the simple human 
heart. As men grow wiser, more spiritually 
apprehensive, they love poetry and legend no 
less, they hear the voice of God no less in the 
simpler forms of speech, but they come to find 



I08 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

the reality behind the figure, to discern the 
spiritual within the material, to be conscious 
that the things seen and heard are symbol and 
sacrament, for the uplifted vision, of things 
unseen and echoing on forever. " As if the 
divine spirit," writes Sabatier in one of his 
bursts of inspired rhetoric, *'in order to be intel- 
ligible to the simple and the ignorant, could not 
as well avail Himself of the fictions of poetry as 
of logical reasonings, of the chants of the angels 
at Bethlehem as of the rabbinical exegesis and 
argumentations of the Apostle Paul. . . . 
And why so much disdain ? Does not childhood 
run on into maturity and old age ? What are 
our most abstract ideas but primitive metaphors 
which have been worn and thinned by usage 
and reflection ? " * The invisible God must be 
declared to man's apprehension, to man's love, 
to man's responsiveness by the Incarnate Son. 
Second : The reproduction of God's life in 



* Sabatier. Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 37, 



IN THE INCARNATION. IO9 

ourselves is made possible only by the Incarna- 
tion. 

Not only does Jesus bring us to know God, 
He bids us be like God. An impressive section 
of the Sermon on the Mount has as its summary 
word. *' Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father which is in Heaven is perfect." 

The imitableness of God is found only in 
Christ. It is found only in those characteristics 
of God which appeared In the Incarnation. To 
such alone, as a possible ** perfection," are men 
bidden in the text. We may not aim to be 
omnipresent — it would be not so much an 
absurdity as blasphemous presumption ; we may 
aim to be long-suffering. When we look at 
God as seen In Christ, we may reverently say 
men are not so much unlike God save as a fact. 
** Made In the divine Image " has new truth and 
new hope for us when we see that image In His 
Son. We come to realize the truth of the pres- 
ent-day philosophy that likeness is of more 
import than difference ; that God in His good- 
ness has much in common with man, when man 



no THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

is represented by Jesus Christ. ** Faith," says 
Professor Nash, *' Faith is surrender to an impas- 
sioned beHef in the unity of God and Christ and 
Man." Christ only reveals what man may be. 

It is often asked, What would Christ do if He 
came to America, if He came to the Twentieth 
Century ? The inference to be drawn from the 
question is what I ought to do in my place and 
my century as a Christ-man. The question is 
asked with an accent of condemnation on Chris- 
tian discipleship, as well by Socialists who have 
no belief in the God of Christianity, as by 
Tolstoi who has a very esoteric belief in Him. 

The right answer to this question involves 
the subject of these lectures, the relation of the 
temporary to the permanent in the Incarnation. 
Is the Imitation of Christ to be literal or is it to 
eliminate temporary accidents ? If God's Full- 
ness of Time had come in our day, or in our 
America, how would Christ have come? Any 
honest answer, in our own heart or in audible 
speech, performs at once the separating process 
by which the abiding Christ is discovered from 



IN THE INC ARM A TION III 

the man of his age and people, by which the 
Eternal God is seen revealed in His unchanging 
attributes. Yet we have not the courage or the 
intelligence to speak out and make that sepa- 
ration without compulsion. We go on, in our 
interpretations and our exhortations, assuming 
that a peasant Jew of the first century is 
America's revelation of God ; and that the 
American Christian in following Him, is in 
someway to reproduce that exact figure. And 
when we fail, as of course we do fail, we despair- 
ingly pronounce our Christianity to be at fault. 
We cannot all be peasants, carpenters, orientals, 
be unmarried and itinerant. We may not wear 
Christ's turban or sandals or flowing robe : 
wearing these, we may, even so, fail to wear the 
changeless garment of His character. We may 
put on His clothes and not put on His mind. 
To wear His raiment and to talk His language, 
as it has failed to retain His true discipleship in 
the land of His birth, so may it absorb and 
satisfy with externals those who in far off lands 
and distant ages can only recover and transmit 
Him by clothing themselves with His spirit. 



112 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Of the many books I have had in hand in the 
preparation of these lectures, none has been 
more illuminating, no one would I more earn- 
estly commend for your painstaking study and 
use, than Atonement and Personality by Canon 
Moberly. His argument closely reasoned and 
widely illustrated, is, in a word, that personality 
is the keynote for an intelligent understanding 
of all great spiritual experiences. To person- 
ality, in God, in man, in Christ who brings God 
and man into relations ; to personality, with 
whose vital characteristics we are intuitively 
familiar, he refers, with absolute originality and 
clearness, the fundamental moral facts of pun- 
ishment, penitence, forgiveness, mediation, atone- 
ment. In two striking pages Moberly turns the 
light of his truth on the appeal to men to correct 
their standard by the standard of Christ, and 
walk always and only in His steps. "In the 
first place," he writes, '' there are a vast number 
of situations in life, which constitute the most 
perplexing of practical problems, in which it is 
not compatible with a reverend conception of 



IN- THE INC ARM A TION 1 1 3 

His Person, to conceive of Him as placed. It 
was wholly incompatible with the nature of the 
work which He came on earth to do, that He 
should have been within the scope of matrimo- 
nial responsibilities or anxieties, or should have 
been closely identified with pa,rty politics, or 
should have initiated a great commercial enter- 
prise, or should have been a successful general, 
or should have dominated the public press. All 
these things are good ; and a score of others, 
of which these are but samples, are also good ; 
but it is levity of mind, not religious reverence, 
which will conceive of Him as directly con- 
ditioned by them. He is indeed a standard to all 
these; but the standard cannot be applied with 
any rough and ready directness of method. And, 
in the second place, if we ask ourselves * * * 
what His apostles and saints would have done in 
conditions which are not so hopelessly incongru- 
ous to them ; (which is, in fact, the same thing 
as asking, in the only reverent form, what it 
would perfectly beseem the Christ-spirit to do) 
we have still to beware of rough and ready ans- 



I 14 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

wers. * * * We are not helped, but hindered, in 
our search for what is right, by the crude attempt 
to imitate, across all gulfs of intervening differ- 
ence, the precise things which He did * * * He 
would have done that which is the absolutely 
wisest and best. When we know what Is abso- 
lutely wisest and best, we shall know what He 
would have done. But we are far more likely 
to find what He would have done, by learning 
dutifully what is wisest and best ; than to discover, 
by a short cut, what is wisest and best, through 
asking what He would have done, and presum- 
ing, in all the crudeness of spiritual indiscipline, 
to give off-hand, perhaps in biblical phraseology, 
a wholly unjust and superficial answer." "^ In no 
other words, that I have met or could frame, is 
the inherent temporary character of much of the 
revelation of the Incarnation so strongly put. 
They summon us, from the pen of a recognized 
master, to essay the task and privilege of rescu- 
ing and commending the permanent. 

The Human Christ is the Figure of the Gos- 



* Atonement and Personality. R. C. Moberly. 308-9. 



IN THE INCARNA TION 1 1 5 

pels. We may approach Christ from two sides. 
The old approach is from above : from the creeds ; 
from theology ; from St. Paul struggling with lan- 
guage adequate to express his own experience ; 
from St. John telling the ripened conviction of 
sixty years intimacy and discipleship ; from God's 
gift out from His own bosom. The new ap- 
proach is from below : from the Gospel of going 
about doing good ; from the faltering faith of men 
and women who followed where they could not 
understand ; from the beauty and power of one 
Life lived on the earth which neither distance, 
nor inadequacy of portrayal, nor unworthiness in 
following can ever lose from the world's ad- 
miring gaze. Both approaches bring us to God. 
The approach by the way of Christ's humanity 
makes every step a reality and a progress, and 
leaves us worshipping in the presence of One 
whom we know and love and count our own. 
He who has grace to discern the Lord in the 
humble Jesus of Nazareth has found God in his 
heart. The utmost precision on the doctrine of 
God Incarnate may leave us with only an intel- 
lectual abstraction. 



Il6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Do not misunderstand me. Here Is no denial 
that the Gospel, the New Testament, the Savior, 
is a gift from above. Our apprehension of Him 
must be from below. We must draw near to 
Jesus and see ; the more we look the more won- 
derful He appears, the more we realize that 
what we see does not exhaust what He is ; that 
our temporary avenues of approach are high- 
ways leading to God Himself. To dehumanize 
Jesus is to forfeit the value of the Incarnation. 
Seeing Him as man, learning His way and His 
nature in His manhood, He stands out more 
clearly and truly as God. The Divinity of our 
Lord, as the divinity of the Scriptures, comes 
out more radiant when approached from the 
human side. The better His temporary and 
earthly features are known the more are they felt 
unequal to explaining Him, the more is He seen 
to transcend the temporary, to belong to man for 
all time as God's eternal revelation of Himself. 

In the next lecture we listen to Christ's word, 
The Temporary and the Permanent in Christ's 
Teaching. 



LECTURE IV. 

the temporary and the permanent in 
Christ's teaching. 

I. A prominent factor in the Incarnation is 
Christ's teaching. 

It is not the foremost factor. Christ is not 
primarily a Teacher. His Person is what excep- 
tionally claims our attention. What He is must 
ultimately explain what He teaches. There 
has been a movement in Christian discipleship 
in the past century to rest its cause on the say- 
ings of Jesus. To reach these the story of de- 
veloping Christian life and Christian thought in 
Acts and Epistles has been passed by, even be- 
littled. Back to the words of the Master is a 
winning watchword to a faithful disciple. It 
may miss the Master's supreme characteristic, 
His Person. Of that Person disciples and apos- 
tles maybe truer witnesses than even His own 



II 8 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

words which have come down to us. To dis- 
parage the writings of St. Paul in the interest of 
the Gospels may be to miss the Gospel's unique 
revelation. It is an attractive summons, that the 
Christian confines himself to the study of the 
words of Christ ; an enlightened Christianity 
recognizes in St. Paul a familiarity with the 
Master's full figure no sayings of His earthly 
ministry can disclose. '' Christ's supremacy over 
His followers does not lie in the fact that He 
uttered deeper truths of God than they, but that 
He alone manifested in His own person the 
eternal Sonship. Paul enters into no absurd 
rivalry with Him as a teacher. Christ's life was 
more than His teaching. Paul's teaching was 
higher than his Hfe." * 

Yet the world comes back to Christ's teach- 
ing as its precious inheritance. It treasures and 
counts over every word. It is eager at the possi- 
ble discovery, in some long hidden manuscript, 
of another saying of Jesus. It addresses itself, 



* Forrest. The Christ of History and Experience, 332. 



IN CHRIS T 'S TEA CHING 1 1 9 

both its scholarship and its faith, to a study of 
that saying, its authenticity, its meaning, the 
light it sheds on His other sayings, on His char- 
acter. The study of any one saying, old or new, 
is not simple. Even in the teachings of Jesus 
there are inevitable difficulties, requiring a dis- 
crimination of values. 

We have seen, in the last lecture, that In the 
Incarnation there must of necessity be tempo- 
rary features. These arise from the human 
aspects of an incarnation ; its necessary relation- 
ship to race and family, to time and place, to 
training and opportunity. The eternal Christ of 
the world's appropriation must emerge from the 
Christ of history. 

These temporary features inhering In Christ s 
incarnation are most distinctively true of His 
teaching, of his spoken life. That teaching was 
in a given language, addressed to hearers, employ- 
ing the current style, using familiar figures, adapt- 
ing itself to its environment, handed on by the 
appropriating receptivity of those who heard Him. 
Jesus was not merely, as Matthew Arnold says, 



I20 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

''above the heads of His reporters." He re- 
mains above the capacity of each generation to 
interpret Him. The best comprehension of one 
age is a moral offence to another. The words 
must be read and sifted anew, separated not 
only from the local conditions of their first ut- 
terance, but from the misconceiving comments 
that have relocalized them in the generations 
since. 

There are sayings of Jesus that trouble en- 
lightened Christian apprehension, not so much 
to understand or even to apply in practice, 
as to reconcile with the ideal of Himself He 
has formed in us, becoming our Lord. There 
are words of His that do not, as they stand, help 
our Christian discipleship, words we wish were 
not there, words we feel constrained to explain 
away. The key at once to the difficulty and its 
removal is found, I am confident, in an honest 
sifting out from Christ's teaching of inevitable 
temporary elements. 

Yet it must be acknowledged on the threshold 
that Christ's teaching is exceptionally free from 



IN CHRIST' S TEA CHING 1 2 1 

temporary characteristics. If we can ascertain 
Jesus' mind, that is truth for us ; to ascertain 
His mind, we must translate His words. 

Three stages mark Christ's teaching : the 
stage of apothegm, condensed and popular ut- 
terance of truth, as in the Sermon on the Mount ; 
the stage of parable, truth pictured in a story, to 
be found by searching ; the stage of elaborated 
discourse, a sort of meditation on His mission, 
found for the most part in St. John's Gospel, 
and taking color from John's own sixty years' 
meditation on his loved Master. In each of these 
styles are temporary features, largely belonging 
to oriental methods of speech. Yet for that very 
reason in part, as picturesquely and predomi- 
nantly ethical, the form assumed is attractive to 
hearers of every age and clime. 

** One of the prominent characteristics of 
Jesus' words," says Stalker, *'is pregnancy. No 
other speaker ever put so much into few words. 
Yet the matter is not too closely packed ; 
all is simple, limpid, musical. * * * It is 
when truth has been long and thoroughly pon- 



122 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

dered that it embodies itself in brief and memora- 
ble language j * * * and such intense and 
convinced thought was so habitual to Jesus that 
the most striking sayings were often coined by 
Him on the spur of the moment, as when he 
said in controversy, ' Render unto Caesar the 
things which are Caesar's, and unto God the 
things which are God's'. * * * No other 
words have adhered as those of Jesus to the 
memory of mankind. Let almost any of His 
sayings be commenced, and the ordinary hearer 
can without difficulty finish the sentence. But, 
if we can retain them so easily since they have 
been written, the first hearers could remember 
them as easily before they were written." * 

Yet, were Jesus' teaching wholly freed from 
temporary features it would be with the loss of 
the historic Christ. To the study of these tem- 
porary characteristics in the teachings of Christ, 
that we may preserve the true gold of His 
message to all time, we give ourselves in this 
lecture. 



* Stalker. The Christology of Jesus, 38-39. 



IN CHRIS T'S TEA CHING 1 2 3 

Some general considerations on Christ's teach- 
ing in its temporary and permanent aspects 
must first engage our attention. Then we will 
study specific sayings of Christ to see how they 
illustrate these considerations and give us the 
permanent truth. 

II. Some general considerations on Christ's 
Teaching in its temporary and permanent aspects. 

I. Christ's teaching had an intelligible mean- 
ing for His immediate hearers. 

This is but an honest, common-sense thing to 
say about the words of a true man. Mystical 
and allegorical interpretations of Old Testament 
stories and New Testament conversations, as 
the only interpretations possible^ empty the 
words of any original reality or seriousness. 

Jesus spoke to be understood. He was say- 
ing something to listeners. Else His talking 
was unreal. A constant temptation appeals, to 
what we think is reverence, to make of Jesus' 
life and teaching a mere mystery. That is to 
make Him untrue: the first reverence is due to 
truth. Even if a mystic interpretation of such 



124 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Stories as those of Genesis be also a true inter- 
pretation, there was something primarily true to 
fact in those stories before the fact could become 
a figure of the invisible. Some good meaning 
to the hearers first if they will find it. Then a 
meaning transcending their capacity, and tran- 
scending ours, to whose apprehension the words 
ever invite us. So the prophets summoning 
exiled Israel to the penitence and the pain, the 
promise and leadership of a Return ; the glories 
never fully realized ; but in their approximation 
pointing on to a greater Return, unto a more 
abiding Home, shared by all God's children, led 
by a King, whose grace none of David's line could 
fill till God Himself took on Him David's heir- 
ship. 

Christ spoke first for His first hearers to 
understand. Hence, there were temporary 
aspects in His speech. They were Orientals, 
were Jews. They must hear with Eastern ears. 
They must apprehend as heirs of Israel's nature 
and promises. And he must speak to ears so 
trained, to hearts so disciplined and so preju- 



IN CHRIS T 'S TEA CHING 1 2 5 

diced. To realize what He aimed to say, and 
what it meant to them, we must put ourselves 
into His place and theirs. Put yourself in 
another's place is the act unto which not only 
our moral sympathy, but our intellectual appre- 
hension is bidden as well. 

Of course there was much they misunder- 
stood, but they understood, something. "The 
popular conception of the Kingdom of God was 
the alloy with which Jesus had to mix His 
teaching, in order to make it fit to mingle with 
the actual life of the world of His day. With- 
out it His thought would have been too ethereal 
and too remote from the living hopes of men. 

* * * As the goldsmith, when he is working 
with finest gold, has to make use of an alloy. 

* * * But, when the form is complete, he 
applies an acid, which evaporates the alloy and 
leaves nothing but the pure gold of the perfect 
ring." * Influenced by contemporary thought 
He set Himself to purify it, as the creeds grew 



* Stalker. The Christology of Jesus, 163. 



126 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

in antagonism to current error. The error and 
ignorance He was combating must be grasped 
ere the truth He set for its remedy can be 
appreciated. 

The meaning of Christ's words as spoken to 
His immediate hearers, and understood by 
them, must therefore be our primary study. 

I very much doubt if the bystanders fell into 
the gross misconception of Jesus' meaning which 
marks much of our partisan discipleship. How- 
ever we may fault their dullness and hardness 
of heart, their quick appreciation of the oriental 
style would never have made spiritual figures 
into ceremonial and theological facts as we are 
constantly doing, or have exaggerated color and 
vividness into rules of right behavior. It is 
more than a question between the literal and the 
figurative ; it is a matter of the atmosphere in 
which a style of speech draws its breath. Our 
Christianity must learn to breathe that atmos- 
phere, native air to them who heard Him, before 
we can make His truth our own. However 
startled and set to murmuring at His hard say- 



IN CHRIS T ' 6" TEA CHING 1 2 7 

ings, those who heard the discourse on the 
Bread of Life in the Synagogue of Capernaum 
could hardly have fallen into the sacramental 
materialism which has marked much pious dis- 
cipleship as it quotes proof texts from the Sixth 
Chapter of St. John. The comfortable words of 
the Communion Office, " Come unto me all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden," meant to His 
eager listeners relief from the traditional burdens 
of the elders, while they reveal depths of com- 
fort found in Jesus Christ for all who stagger 
and wander and suffer. 

Starting with its meaning to the hearers, 
Christ's teaching keeps on without limits in its 
application. *' Its timeless and placeless note 
seems only the more accentuated by its narrow 
medium. * ♦ ♦ j^ j^g^g ^^ marvelous faculty 
of being at home everywhere, intelligible in 
every speech, comprehensible to every mind, 
without country or time, because so akin to 
universal man. And it is more than curious 
that the teaching of which this can be said is so 
marked by the actualities of the hour and the 



128 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

place of its birth." * These words of Fairbairn, 
in their eloquent tribute to the universality of 
Christ's teaching, recall us even more forcibly to 
the birthplace, to its first message as spoken 
unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 

There follows : 

2. Christ uses the language of accommoda- 
tion. 

Some words frighten us. If we call the Book 
of Jonah a Work of Imagination we use a com- 
plimentary term ; if we call it Fiction in the 
Bible we throw suspicion on the Book. The 
expressions have the same meaning. It is some- 
times wise to substitute a word that has never 
been discredited ; sometimes better to hold fast 
to a desirable term and make it honorable. 
Language of Accommodation is a way of speak- 
ing adapted to peoples' way of thinking. If it 
confirms dangerous falsehood accommodation is 
wrong. If it conforms to current beliefs on 



* Fairbairn. The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 
388-89. 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 1 29 

incidental and unimportant matters, while teach- 
ing truth of first concern, it is doing what is wise, 
it is using the only possible means for enlighten- 
ing and uplifting men. The question on which 
its propriety hinges is, What does the teaching 
aim at, to which all other purposes are subordi- 
nate? 

Christ imtst use the language of accommoda- 
tion as incarnate in the flesh, dealing with 
human nature from the ground of human nature 
as well. If not Himself unaware of facts no 
longer His concern in the day of His earthly 
life, He at least must treat men as ignorant. 
He must not obscure the teaching He came into 
the world to give by going out of His way to 
teach something else. In so doing. He awakens 
unnecessary suspicion. He imperils His business 
of teaching men the knowledge of God and the 
way of right living. There was in Him no 
hypocritical accommodation, concealing what 
He knew that He might win what He wished. 
He shared the expectations, was limited by the 
conditions of His time. When He talked of 



130 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

that with which He was supremely possessed, 
God's way and will, He talked to men as a man 
among men. His limitations did not imply, as 
with the Scribes, that He was not always open 
to fuller truth. '' These current and traditional 
ideas, which came to Him, not from heaven, but 
from His race and environment " — and in whose 
forms He embodied His divine teaching, as He 
Himself was in the form of a servant — "never 
succeeded in corrupting the inimitable purity of 
His inner piety or in falsifying the divine 
inspirations of His heart." "^ 

As we read the Gospels we hear Christ 
actually using the language of accommodation : 
in His teaching of truth eternal attaching His 
language to current conceptions about things 
temporal. 

Take the subject with which the Gospel 
stories abound, possession by demons. The 
theory that seems to deal in the most satisfac- 
tory way with all the facts of the Gospel narra- 



* Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 193. 



IN- CHRIST'S TEA CHING 1 3 1 

tives, the symptoms of the sufferers and the 
personifying of the demons, put side by side 
with modern medical knowledge and modern 
confessed ignorance, is that Christ adopted con- 
ceptions and used language generally current in 
speaking of lunatics. The assumption is not 
without difficulty, but at any rate, let us concede 
that It is no impeachment of the Master's moral 
and intellectual honesty. You may prefer to 
hold that certain epileptics and deaf mutes were 
inhabited by demons, while others were only 
victims of disease ; that the powers of evil were 
specially arrayed in Jesus' time against His 
supreme manifestation of good ; or, with Bush- 
nell, that possession holds over to our time, 
though we have not the insight to discern the 
spirits. You may confess that like mysteries of 
hypnotic suggestion and duplex personality and 
sensual slavery — the drunkard and libertine — • 
confront our Ignorance to-day. Yet It was not 
with these medical and psychological questions 
Jesus was dealing when He lifted heavy bur- 
dens from men's spirits, and bade the bystanders 
behold the power of God. 



132 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

A like accommodation to current beliefs is 
seen in Christ's attitude toward critical ques- 
tions of the Old Testament. Did David write 
Psalm no because Jesus ascribes it to Him? 
We no longer feel bound, in loyalty to Him, 
to affirm it, when scholars like Gore in England 
and Peters at home see no connection between 
Jesus' incidental statement and the critical fact. 
The exact authorship of any Psalm is only to be 
known by critical stiidy. Jesus' argument was 
in no way affected by exactness in that respect. 
He speaks of the Psalm as the people of His 
day were wont to speak of it. To have done 
anything else would have aroused unnecessary 
hostility, would be claiming to be wise beyond 
what He knew. 

Again, Christ naturally falls into the argu- 
mentum ad hominem. He meets His listeners 
on grounds familiar to them, and shows them 
therein their error and the power of truth. 
Confronting the Sadducees in their denial of 
the resurrection He appeals to the Pentateuch, 
the portion of the Old Testament on which the 



IN CHRIS T 'S TEA CHING 133 

Sadducees most relied. His presentation of 
God as the God of Abraham and of Isaac and 
of Jacob, and therefore Abraham, Isaac and 
Jacob hve on, is an argumentative use of the 
Old Testament which our timidity would have 
never dared to make nor our blindness been 
able to see. The argument does not rest on 
the present tense : I am their God, therefore the 
patriarchs are still living. Christ is bolder, with 
a diviner insight. In proclaiming Himself the 
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God affirms 
Himself to be in relation with these men. Men 
with whom God is in relation are blessed and 
not wretched, are righteous and not wicked, are 
living and not dead, '* God is not the God of 
the dead but of the living, for all live unto 
Him." *' And this is life eternal to know Thee." 
Christ's logic starts with accommodation to the 
level of the humblest and issues in truth beyond 
the level of the wisest, to be apprehended only 
by spiritual intuition. 

It follows once more, and In the line on which 
emphasis has already been laid. 



134 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

3. Christ Is an Oriental speaking to Orien- 
tals. 

Christ teaches by figures. Where our stricter 
apprehension sees only the most literal, even 
there a figure lurks. '* He spoke in pictures, 
not In syllogisms." 

Speaking in figures belongs to the atmosphere 
of the East. The East seems itself a figure : its 
heat and haze ; Its camels and caravans ; Its 
leisure and dreams ; its tents and palaces ; its 
philosophers and beggers. They are facts, I 
suppose, but facts which dreams are made of. 
They are so far off as to be no part of our 
reality. They are so far off as to become the 
story tales of our childhood and the philosophies 
of our old age. Yet out of the East has come 
our religion. An Oriental is our Lord. While 
we can never be over eager In claiming Him as 
Lord of universal humanity, and count it an 
added tribute to His divine sonship that His 
person and message can be limited to no race or 
age, yet we must remember that He Himself 
came out of the East to be the Lord of all 



IN CHRIS T ' S TEA CHING 135 

worlds. His Eastern clothes and Eastern speech 
are indeed temporary features in the Universal 
Son of Man, features to be translated and 
allowed for, yet features that give color to the 
divine picture for men's admiration everywhere 
and always. 

Christ's teaching by figures sets a seal on the 
divineness of imagination. '* Jesus never says, 
You ought to exert a good influence on your 
fellow-creatures, but. Ye are the salt of the 
earth, ye are the light of the world ; never. 
All events are ordered by Providence, but, 
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? 
yet one of them shall not fall to the ground 
without your Father." * Without imagination, 
power to picture and so create, man would be 
without love and without hope, without creed 
and without worship, without home and without 
character. 

An Oriental temper inheres, more or less, in 
all mankind. The Oriental can seem to get on 
without the West though it be to the loss of 

* Stalker, The Christology of Jesus, 39. 



136 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

vigor and efficiency. But the West can never 
live wholly on its own products. The value of 
the East is not to be exaggerated to discrediting 
western reason and practical sense. Yet to the 
East, of tropical suns and forests of palm and 
orchid, of repose and contemplation, we come 
not alone for spices and jewels and rare woods ; 
not alone for birds of beauty and beasts of 
might ; not alone for kings, conquerors, palaces; 
we come for great truths and men to listen to 
them, and men to speak and live them, and for 
Him who spoke as never man spoke and lived 
the life that is the light of men. Jesus came 
from Asia, and we carry Him back to Asia 
again, their Savior and ours. And the wisdom 
of the East is found more akin to the work of 
the East because one Man is Lord of both West 
and East. 

The parable, the Oriental mode of teaching 
which Christ specially chose, is figure not alone 
for its specific truth, but figure of truth's appeal 
to universal characteristics and possibilities in 
man's nature. The parable first arouses inter- 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING I 37 

est, then stimulates curiosity. Man may stop 
there, amused but uninstructed, a looker-on but 
not a sharer. The parable, its graphic picture 
the delight of the Eastern hearers, leaves some- 
thing for that hearer to do that he may make 
its truth his own. The parable both conceals 
and reveals truth. From them that have not it 
takes away even that which they have ; that see- 
ing they shall see and not perceive, and hearing 
they shall hear and not understand. The mes- 
sage of Christ's Oriental parables it has in large 
measure been left to the Western world to 
appropriate. The permanent message of the 
Gospel of the Man of the East has been dis- 
covered and made their own by men of the West. 

Once more : 

4. Christ's Teaching Is Principles and not 
Rules. 

This is its most distinctive characteristic, one 
that must be grasped if the Christian message is 
to be found. Failing to find the principle that 
lies back of every particular teaching, we may 
not only miss the teaching Itself, but gather 



138 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

from the concrete example the very opposite of 
its intended lesson. In all the aspects of His 
teaching : as an intelligible message to the 
immediate hearer ; as accommodation along 
lines of secondary ignorance, that He may lead 
men to primary truth ; in resort to pictures and 
appeal to imagination, as peculiarly dear to men 
of the East and agreeable to human nature 
everywhere, Christ's supreme aim is to impress 
principles. Their application is to be the duty 
and privilege of Christian discipleship when the 
principle has been mastered. Again and again 
Christ enunciates the principle afresh, refusing 
to relieve his hearers of the responsibility of 
applying it for themselves. This He does that 
He may not lend Himself to legalism. Moses 
gave a law, Confucius gave a law, Ethical Cul- 
ture gives a law, all school-master systems give 
a law ; the Master summons men to discipleship, 
sets forth the principles on which discipleship to 
Christ must be based, leaves men in every age, 
of every race, with every individual need and 
condition, to measure for themselves their per- 
sonal conformity to that standard. 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 139 



This it is that makes Christ's teaching the 
world's lesson book. This it is which most of 
all requires the separation of its temporary ex- 
pression that its permanent nature may be dis- 
covered. The chief duty of the student of 
Christ's words is to find the great principles 
His words are intended to establish. In these 
principles, not many in number but unique and 
radical, is Christianity's secret. They are illus- 
trated afresh, and their truth reaffirmed in new 
light, as in His ministry He faces men's varied 
difficulties and sins and needs. But they are 
never put as abstract statements : they must be 
discovered, and formulated if you will, from their 
appearance and reappearance in His ministering 
life. 

The Bishop of Ripon in his recent William 
Selden Noble lectures at Harvard emphasizes in 
brilliant fashion this characteristic of Jesus' 
teaching. Ascertain by study and disclpleship 
the principles which underly true Christian 
action, and every counsel of the Master shines 
in new light. " He that recelveth a prophet in 



I40 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's 
reward " — that is no mere counsel of hospitality 
and promise of return ; many of us may never 
have the chance to receive a prophet or be equal to 
enjoying his happiness ; but the cause is one, all 
who have it on their heart, all who sympathize 
with any good work, the humblest and the high- 
est, are partakers of a like gladness ; they stand 
together in the ranks of Christ's servants, the 
giver of the cup of cold water in Christ's name, 
and St. Paul winning city after city to Christ's 
discipleship. 

The grip of law as the one condition of any 
discipleship is powerful, despite the Master's dis- 
owning of its value and refusal to apply it. Law 
served its temporary place as a method for bond 
servants. Principles belong to the permanent 
system as a method for sons. It is easier to be 
servants and keep rules, than to be sons and 
make free decision. In Christ's household there 
can be sons alone. A son's business is to 
acquaint himself with the family order, to bring 
his heart into harmony with the family temper. 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING I4I 

and then apply what he has learned to the de- 
tails of his own action. Christ sternly refuses to 
interfere between two brothers in a dispute over 
an inheritance, but ''proceeds to translate the 
question of inheritance into a question of the 
spiritual life," thus giving a principle by which 
true Christians could themselves adjudicate all 
such disputes. " A man's life consisteth not in 
the abundance of the things which he possess- 
eth." 

The failure is again and again made in the 
history of Christian living, to grasp Christianity 
as principle ; discipleship to Christ is once more 
advocated as devotion to law. Noble as charac- 
ters like St. Francis and Count Tolstoi must be 
confessed to be, incapable as we must freely 
acknowledge ourselves to be of measuring up to 
their standard of consecration, I cannot but feel 
that their literalism in interpreting Christ's 
teachings, their ordering of their lives after an 
external conformity to what they hold to be 
details of law, misses His method altogether. 
Such an interpretation of discipleship translates 



142 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

itself into beauty in simple and devoted lives like 
theirs. It does not, however, give God's per- 
manent message for all sorts and conditions of 
men. With other natures, and under different 
conditions, a like reading of Christ's message as 
law loses its power as gospel. As we saw in our 
study on the imitation of the Incarnate Christ, 
we cannot reverently put Him into our place, or 
ourselves into His place, in every particular. 
We might succeed in reproducing his clothing in 
which externals quite a different spirit from His 
would masquerade. ''He that hath no sword, 
let him sell his garment and buy one * * * 
And they said. Lord, behold here are two 
swords." Swords are wanted now, actual steel 
swords, is the conclusion of the listening and 
loyal disciples. In His answer we see both their 
want of insight and the candor of the Evange- 
lists' record. *' And Jesus said unto them. It is 
enough." Two swords are enough, does our 
literalism still interpet ? Oh, no ! The tone is 
that of sadness. " You mistake me grievously. 
You have not caught the truth which swords 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 143 

served only to Illustrate. No swords whatever 
are wanted, but courage and patience and trust 
to face the evils sure to come. It is enough. 
Let the subject drop. You will learn some time 
to know my spirit rather than to catch up my 
words." Till that spirit is learned Christ's 
Gospel has not become the world's permanent 
possession. 

III. These general considerations find detailed 
application in every page of the Gospel. The 
permanent is to be deduced from the temporary 
in Christ's teaching, as we separate its larger 
meaning from that borne by the words to the 
consciences of those who first heard them ; as, 
In our fuller knowledge of history and science, 
we make allowance for the language of accom- 
modation, and grasp His eternal spiritual mean- 
ing under temporary disabilities ; as we admire 
the natural picturesqueness of His style, yet find 
its practical prose for our less responsive imagin- 
ation ; as we search for the abiding principles of 
Christian disclpleship behind their passing ex- 
pression as Jesus set them forth to His cotem- 



144 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

poraries. The task is a difficult one. It is a 
necessary and a worthy study just so far as 
Christianity is God's message to every people 
and time. It is the business to which all Chris- 
tians are bidden as they are put in trust of that 
message, given in a time and a tongue, to make 
it a message of vital use for all times and ton- 
gues. 

We find ourselves asking, What Is left. What 
is permanent, What is the abiding meaning of 
Christ's words ? We cannot give a list of the 
permanent things in the New Testament, leav- 
ing the temporary out. We cannot take every 
saying of Jesus and indicate what, in its words, 
its style, its conditions, is to be regarded as 
transitory. To do this would surpass the limits 
of a course of lectures and a lecturer's ability. 
It would also contradict the idea we have reached 
as characteristic of the Gospel, since it would be 
giving results for men to accept instead of illus- 
trating processes they are bound themselves 
freely to apply. From a few and varied exam- 
ples learn a method for all. We will take up a 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 145 

few texts or classes of texts which illustrate the 
general considerations we have maintained. 

I. The Sermon on the Mount contains some 
very characteristic sayings of Christ: *' Who- 
soever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn 
to him the other also* * * Whosoever shall take 
away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. "^ * * 
Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with 
him twain * * * give to him that asketh thee." 
In form these sayings are apothegms. In style 
they are concrete, picturesque, vivid, not with- 
out the figure of hyperbole. In method they 
embody, in language suited to the time, with 
cases familiar to the hearer, abiding Christian 
principles. These principles are to be ascer- 
tained, not alone by a study of their application 
found in the concrete cases named, but by a dis- 
crimination of the abiding principle from the 
case which temporarily illustrates it. The 
Christian lesson is never to be learned by a 
slavish and unintelligent performance of just 
those very acts. It is doubtful whether even 
Jesus' immediate disciples, however primitive 



14^ THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

and neighborly and Arabic were the relations of 
common people in the Holy Land, could wisely 
have done these exact things in realizing their 
Master's teaching : the language seems pur- 
posely exaggerated to drive the truth home. It 
is certain that to do those precise things now, to 
turn the left cheek when the right is smitten, to 
give without question, would be to prove false 
to the Christian virtues these illustrations aim 
to picture. We are to find therein the hitherto 
unknown but divine lessons : That Christians 
cherish no malice, be not contentious, enter 
into their brothers needs and give themselves 
out in his behalf. Then let us practise these 
virtues, in the light of God's spirit shed on to- 
day's conditions. 

Many Christian people have felt that charity 
organization was open to the accusation that it 
substituted institutional aid for personal brother- 
liness and so missed the Christian spirit. Un- 
questionably, in practice associated charities have 
been open to this charge. Yet, its most earnest 
advocates are devout Christian disciples. They 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 147 

find In its principles no contradiction to the 
teachings of Christ, but rather the intelHgent 
apphcatlon of those teachings to the conditions 
of modern Hfe. They find in its personal in- 
vestigations when conducted in a Christian 
spirit, in its gift of friendship rather than alms, 
in its discrimination between the deserving and 
the underserving, in its unwillingness to pauper- 
ize or duplicate, just the Master's temper. He 
showed it in a different way, He portrayed it 
In other language. That was only because He 
was Himself a poor man, was associated almost 
wholly with the poor, kept apart from organized 
activity — yet, He gave the notes on which all 
organization must proceed. The utmost that 
can be said against the Chrlstlikeness of organ- 
ized charity is that in our complex civilization, 
where each man is absorbed by his specialty, in 
place of his own friendly visitation he sends a 
wise and good representative. Jesus did that 
when He sent the disciples out two by two. 
He does that as Lord of all men when He 
pronounces, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 



148 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

one of the least of these my brethren, ye have 
done it unto me. Such modern writers on Char- 
ity as Francis Greenwood Peabody, ''Jesus 
Christ and the Social Question," are getting at 
the heart of Jesus' teaching, and are finding in 
Him principles applicable to business and society 
as well as to almsgiving, principles whose large 
application find their birth in those simpler 
human relationships with which alone His life on 
earth was concerned.* 

Jesus' teaching on Riches, such words as 
*' Woe unto you that are rich," *' How hardly 
shall they that have riches enter into the king- 
dom of God " seem on the surface to lend them- 
selves to socialism. His own life was lived in 
very humble surroundings. The rich, as He 
knew them, were rich from extortion. He saw 
the peril of riches in a corrupt government and 
a decadent civilization. Against that peril He 
spoke with fearless and unmeasured words. So 
of like riches would He speak to-day. Yet, it 



Peabody. Jesus Christ and the Social Question. 
Chap. V. 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING 1 49 

is poverty of spirit that he commends as the 
ideal temper of those poor in worldly goods. 
Where He in His earthly ministry finds humility 
and serviceableness associated with worldly pros- 
perity, as with the family at Bethany and the 
counselor Joseph of Arimathaea, He welcomed 
their character and their wealth alike. Jesus 
did not array the rich and the poor against each 
other. To both He proclaimed the principles 
of stewardship for what they had, the danger 
lest their attitude toward material things, com- 
placency In their wealth, bitterness because of 
their poverty, should lose out of their life spirit- 
ual riches. "^ 

2. At the other end of Christ's short earthly 
ministry we have the so-called Great Forty 
Days. 

To the teaching of that period has been 
assigned, in the opinion of many Churchmen, 
detailed instruction on the organization of the 
Church. Such Instruction is assumed as proper 



* Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, 
Chap. IV. 



150 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

to be given rather than found expressed and 
recorded. It is a deduction from the one phrase, 
found in the Book of Acts, " appearing unto them 
by the space of forty days, and speaking the 
things concerning the Kingdom of God." 

Two radically different suppositions confront 
each other on Christ's method with His Church, 
as we face the supposed teaching of these forty 
days. The one theory maintains that Christ 
not only founded and started His Church, but 
that He outlined and filled in all essential details 
of its organization. The other sees the Master 
Himself guided by God's Spirit, and leaving 
His Apostles with the promise of the same guid- 
ance to develop the Church to meet the needs 
of men. The one conception finds the three- 
fold ministry and the two necessary sacraments 
already in being in the three years when Christ 
was the visible Head of His Church, the Holy 
Communion being in a fashion anticipated by 
teaching and practice. The other finds the 
diaconate coming into being from the needs of 
the poor, the presbyterate from the establish- 



IN CHRIST'S TEA CHING I 5 I 

ment of local churches, the episcopate as the 
Apostles are called from earth ; the Holy Com- 
munion gradually separated from the love feast, 
taken from the home meal to the Church ordi- 
nance, and surrounded by ceremonial ensuring its 
reverent perpetuation. If the one idea lays 
emphasis on Christ's minute care for His Church 
and so exalts its divine origin, the other asserts 
the continued presence of the Holy Spirit, 
Christ's witness and representative, and so 
magnifies the abiding divine oversight. 

The two conceptions are practically a setting 
of temporary over against permanent interpreta- 
tions of God's way and word in the teaching of 
His Son. One passage, at the very best two, in 
the Gospel, where Christ speaks of His Church. 
One, albeit most solemn and thrice reported, 
record of the Sacrament of His Body and 
Blood, with perhaps an anticipatory discourse. 
Are these sayings the measure of the permanent 
value of the Church and the Sacraments in the 
mind of Christ for His people? We may not, 
with the ecclesiastic, import into Christ's mind 



152 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

that of which there Is no evidence, and give to 
Church and Sacrament a supreme importance, 
transcending personal devotion and righteous liv- 
ing, for which the Gospel story furnishes no war- 
rant. Nor may we, on the other hand, deny to 
the church of Peter and Paul, to the church of 
the fathers, to the mother church of England, 
and the free church of America, the right to 
determine under the guidance of the Spirit where 
emphasis shall be laid and expansion given to that 
of which Christ spoke only the germinal thought ; 
what, in His plan and after His method, belongs 
supremely to Christianity's permanent deposit, 
to be adapted in its details to the needs of the 
generations as they come. 

Indeed, the generations may lay a new 
emphasis where it has not been laid before, or 
take off one that has already served its purpose. 
The Church ** must quit one point of view and 
move on to another. This is because its own 
historical position is shifting. While Scripture is 
meant to explain all the changing aspects of provi- 
dence, providence, on the other hand, likewise 



IM CHRIST'S TEACHING 153 

casts on Scripture an ever-changing light. The 
organizing thought of theology, if the Church is 
progressing instead of stagnating, will not be one 
truth or another forever. In our day the best 
ruling idea may possibly be the Kingdom of 
God or the Fatherhood of God ; but, if so, it will 
be, not because this was the supreme conception 
of Jesus, but because it is the thought which 
corresponds most intimately to the knowledge 
and the temper of the age." * The teaching of 
Jesus was in fact by no means formal. It was 
fragmentary, and " its fragmentary character was 
not an accident ; it was the result of a reaction 
against the tone and methods of existing 
teachers, and was involved in a deliberate 
attempt to come in contact with the humblest 
and most ordinary intelligence." f The Gospel 
was really Jesus Dealing with Men, We 
must stand with those men, put ourselves, 
as we may be helped to do, into Jesus' own 



* Stalker. The Christology of Jesus, 28-29. 
\ Contentio Veritatis. 112, 



154 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT. 

mind, if we would become possessed of the per- 
manent treasures of His Gospel. Further read- 
justments of Christian truth and Church rela- 
tionships are ahead of us, as the permanent 
message claims its own. New emphasis will be 
laid where He intended the ages to come to lay 
them. Old contentions, founded on His words 
but not on His purpose, will disappear as He 
wishes them to disappear. The touchstone on 
How to live, How to serve. How to think. 
Christlike, will be the unfolding of the perma- 
nent in the teaching of Christ. We have touched 
His teaching heretofore too much on its external 
side. That is because dealing with the external 
is easy for us. It is not Christ's way. He uses 
externals as entrances into the inner where the 
Spirit waits to teach. For the Spirit's teaching, 
as the abiding Word of God in His Son, our 
reverent study is to lead the way. 

Two striking examples of the temporary and 
the permanent in Christ's teaching we must pass 
at this time with the bare mention. 

The first, Christ's freedom in dealing with the 



IN CHRIS T ' S TEA CHING 1 5 5 

text of the Old Testament Scripture, has been 
spoken of in the previous lecture. In Him, in 
His person and in His teaching, that Scripture 
was fulfilled. Fulfilled as He opens its mean- 
ing, the Scripture keeps on speaking a living 
message in history. 

The other, the eschatology of Jesus, the con- 
stant recurrence in His teaching of the apoca- 
lyptic style, with the marked approval of that 
style in the Epistles, and its full efBorescence in 
the Book of Revelation, is so pronounced a 
phenomenon in the relation of the temporary 

and the permanent in New Testament Revela- 
tion as to deserve consideration by itself in the 

closing lecture. Eschatology, and the chosen 
vehicle for expressing it in the style of an apoca- 
lypse. Is perhaps the most difificult and as yet 
untraversed subject in the Scriptures. Christian 
belief is still fast bound in the spell of its weird 
and mysterious fascination. 

3. One saying, or a group of sayings, 
recorded of Jesus in the Gospels, claims our final 
attention, both from Its prominence and value. 



156 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

and from the light It may shed on our subject. 
This is His teaching about sacrifice. 

The permanent meaning of sacrifice had to 
gain its place slowly ; it is still far from com- 
plete apprehension. As an Old Testament idea 
it was comparatively clear, though its clearness 
had to do with its material rather than with its 
spiritual significance. Old Testament sacrifice 
was the offering even unto death of one's best to 
one's God. Death of the best, as a gift to God, 
were its prime notes. 

When Jesus came it would seem that the old 
idea of sacrifice must disappear. Yet Jesus 
early faced the fact that He too, God's well- 
beloved Son, the best thing in God's universe 
must die. Facing the fact, He broods over it. 
The death of the righteous is an inevitable issue 
In an unrighteous world. That death In some 
mysterious way works back for the good of the 
unrighteous. That death by some sort of 
appropriation the redeemed must make their 
own. So the mind of the Master feels its way, 
pondering the problem of evil, conscious of the 



IN CHRIS T'S TEA CHING I 5 7 

long-suffering love of God, reading the large- 
vlsloned words of the prophets. Then Jesus 
speaks : ''The Son of man shall be delivered up 
into the hands of men, and they shall kill 
Him ; " " The Son of Man came not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister, and to give His 
life a ransom for many ; " "If any man would 
come after me, let him deny himself, and take 
up his cross and follow me. For whosoever 
would save his life shall lose It, and whosoever 
shall lose his life for my sake shall find it ; " 
" This cup is the New Testament In my blood, 
which is shed for you." 

Here, in Jesus' meditation and utterance, all 
the words, all the ideas, whose later formulation 
has revolutionized the doctrine of man and God. 
Here are death, the cross, a ransom, the blood, 
the new covenant in the cup, all the familiar 
terms of the Christian sacrifice on Christ's own 
thoughtful and persuasive lips. Does the Old 
Testament measure their meaning ? Do the 
words themselves measure their meaning ? Do 
Paul and Peter, do Augustine and Anselm, do 



158 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Bushnell and Moody measure their meaning ? 
Has the permanent message of Christ's Sacri- 
fice, and the details of its sorrow and blessing, 
yet appeared from its incidents in time, from the 
words of Master and disciple striving to express 
it ? Rather is not our thinking and preaching 
still in bondage to the material elements of 
Christ's sacrifice, and of our sacrifice in His 
name, from which He strove to deliver His dis- 
ciples, and against which Paul uttered repeated 
protest even while his reasoning and phraseology 
fell again under its dominion? In the perma- 
nent message of Christ's work in man's redemp- 
tion blood is no longer blood, death is no longer 
death, the cross is no longer a cross. Christ's 
touch on them, Christ's use of them, has trans- 
figured their physicalness, their horror, their 
ignominy, into symbols, and symbols of beauty. 
The cross is the permanent symbol of Christian- 
ity ; but it is not the wooden cross, it is not the 
Roman cross, it is not Paul's cross, or the cross 
of Protestantism, it is not the cross of my ideal 
bearing ; it is the cross of Christ, the cross His 



IN CHRIST'S TEACHING I 59 

life and death Illumined. ** We are left, here at 
least and now, still gazing as from afar, not in 
fruition but in faith, on that which we have not 
realized in ourselves. We are still kneeling to 
worship, with arms outstretched from ourselves 
in a wonder of belief and loving adoration, that 
reality wholly unique and wholly comprehensive, 
the figure of Jesus crucified."* 



* Moberly. Atonement and Personality, 323. 



LECTURE V. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN PAUL's 

THEOLOGY. 

I. Paul is the Christian theologian. He set 
the scope, even gave the phrase, for all later 
theologies. Paul did not know Christ in the 
flesh. Not *' from his writings alone would the 
reader ever know that there was a baptism in 
Jordan, or a temptation in the wilderness, or a 
sermon on the mount, or a parable of tender 
wisdom, or a scathing of hypocrites, or an up- 
lifting of penitents, or an agony in Gethsemane, 
of one who bore the name of the Son of Man." * 
Experiencing Christ only as a power Paul 
sought to interpret Him to himself and to 
others. 

Beyond question Is he not only an Inspired 
Interpreter of the religion of Christ, but its 



* Martineau. Seat of Authority in Religion, 379-80. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY l6l 

most original and profound interpreter as well. 
Of the splendor of Paul's witness for Jesus it is 
difficult to speak with sufficient earnestness. Of 
the change Paul wrought in the attitude of the 
world of men toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
and of the Gospel in its presentation toward the 
world of men, it is impossible to express one's 
self with exaggeration. He found the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ, in the hands of its first apostles, 
little more than the faith of a Jewish sect who 
believed that Messiah had come. He left it a 
message for universal humanity, claiming the re- 
sponse of the world's allegiance. Converted 
from the persecutor to the Christian disciple he 
set his eye on Rome ; and every step he travelled, 
every thought he forged, was to bring that world- 
capital into captivity to Jesus Christ, the high- 
ways, the commerce which all centered on Rome 
centering also on Christ, roads for Christ's mes- 
sengers to travel, agencies for dispersing Christ's 
truth far and wide. 

Did Paul succeed ? He died, as his Master 
had died, obscure, unknown. Yet of all figures 



1 62 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

of that age, and they are mighty, soldiers and 
kings and philosophers, the only one the whole 
world cares to remember is the name of Christ, 
and Paul is His interpreter. I sometimes think 
of that tent-maker, poor foot traveller along the 
dusty highways, with stooping shoulders and 
bleared eyesight, and frame wracked with fre- 
quent fever, and wonder if even his dauntless soul, 
his inward eye of fire, caught from afar the vision 
of his fame for all time to come, or measured the 
allegiance he would win for the cross and Him 
crucified. His has been a triumph more rapid 
and complete than he would have wished for, 
since in conquering it has conceded much that he 
valued as essential. His thought has mastered 
Christian thinking after a fashion he would be 
the first to regret, since Paul's theology some- 
times obscures the truth of the Master. He 
surely would hesitate to claim or even to accept 
the dominant place Christianity has accorded to 
him. Men are instinctive hero-worshippers, and 
Paul stands forth as Christianity's hero, Paul the 
theologian. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 63 

Unique as he is, Paul was also a man of his 
time. '* His school days in a Grecian city, his 
daily contact with its manners and its arts, 
his trade with the shepherds on the hills above 
and the captains of the ports below, had opened 
to him a world which it were more divine to save 
than to destroy. * * * At the same time, 
his own vehement and capacious nature moved 
uneasily, though on that very account with the 
more intensity, within the narrow discipline of 
his inherited religion ; and was ready to burst Its 
ligaments and, if only the lash would be quiet 
on the will, to achieve a double fleetness on the 
wing of love." * 

He was a man eager to claim all the relation- 
ships which were the title deeds of honor in the 
circle within which he was born. 

These honors, both of them his by right, both 
of them vehemently championed, were two. 

He was a Roman citizen. When the chief 
captain answered, ** With a great sum obtained 



* Martineau. Seat of Authority in Religion, 379. 



164 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

I this citizenship," Paul answered, " But I am a 
Roman born." 

He was a rabbi-taught Jew, ''a Hebrew of 
Hebrews ; as touching the law, a Pharisee ; as 
touching the righteousness which is in the law, 
found blameless." * 

Of both inheritances, however difficult their 
combination in one man, he was alike proud. 
However supreme and universal the embrace of 
Jesus as Lord to which his Christian disciple- 
ship attained ; however unstinted his outlook of 
sympathy and confidence on all the world of men, 
Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free ; he remained 
with a reserve of his nature in touch with the 
superb pride of a citizen of Rome, with the 
separateness of the elect people of God. A rare 
combination : the aristocracy of Roman and 
Hebrew exclusiveness with the democracy of an 
universally interpreted Gospel ; a combination 
found only in a short period of the world's his- 
tory, within a limited area ; an effective combina- 

* Phil III, 5-6. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 165 

tion in a man of reality dealing with humanities. 
We are glad Paul was just a man of his unique 
time ; it gives him kinship with ourselves, a kin- 
ship not of exact conditions, but of world-long 
sympathies. 

The man and his thinking require a translat- 
ing process. All the more marvelous that out 
of these two elements a Christian was made, the 
Christian, we may say, nearest both to the mind 
and the heart of his Master. This world Chris- 
tian was made out of a Roman and a Hebrew. 
" No permanent change," writes Dr. Hatch, 
" takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of 
a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs 
and usages of that race." * 

The Epistles of St. Paul, especially in what 
we call their argumentative and doctrinal por- 
tions, are a struggle on the great Apostle's part 
to express in words the change through which 
his soul had passed. 

The terminology adopted by an earnest man is 



^ Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages. Hatch, Page 4. 



1 66 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

the result of his experiences. He has his favor- 
ite words chosen to express these experiences. 
Since Paul's life divided itself into two parts, 
before and after his conversion, his ideas ranged 
themselves in antithetical form. His thoughts 
grouped themselves and found utterance in con- 
trasts : law and grace, faith and works, the old 
man and the new, the letter and the spirit. A 
negative is put first, but only that it may 
heighten the contrast with the positive. What 
a man has become shines out the more from what 
he was. 

The greater the experience, the greater the 
task of finding words in which to express it. 
The explanation, in large measure, of the over- 
whelming style characterizing Paul's epistles : 
its long sentences, its intricacies of construction, 
its anacolutha, its parentheses, its massive and 
compelling sweep, its breaking from reasoning 
into doxology, its things hard to be understood 
which the ignorant and unsteadfast may wrest 
to their own destruction, is to be found, not so 
much in the man himself as in the mastering ex- 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 6/ 

periences of his life which he is striving to record 
in words. " Human language must of necessity 
act as a limitation to the freedom of the incom- 
prehensible, illimitable Spirit. A man full of 
the Holy Spirit will strive to pour forth to others 
the gift which God has committed to him to profit 
withal ; but when he would do this In words, he 
finds that the more he is possessed with the 
Spirit the more is he straitened, hampered, 
baf^ed by the limitations of speech. He speaks 
with stammering lips ; his utterings are broken, 
abrupt, inconsequent. It is the uninspired, 
shallow, conventional man that puts forth all his 
mind in a clear, simple, popular style; the 
prophet finds the Spirit thwarted by the letter, 
and he cannot fully utter the truth that is In 
him." * Paul must reason out his experiences, 
must tell forth his conclusions, before his fellow 
men, because they seemed to have solved his 
own hard problem and to be solvent as well for 
all human needs. 



* Bartlett. The Letter and the Spirit, 25-26. 



1 68 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

In uttering his heart he uses words already in 
existence, words in large measure cherished by 
him and his old companions. He must use 
words with which he was familiar, and strive to 
give them new force. You remember Luther's 
tribute to Paul's terminology when he says that 
his words are like living creatures having hands 
and feet. They become words of power. They 
are rooted in Paul's rich nature and supreme 
experiences. In a measure they convey that 
nature and experience to us, the measure being 
largely our responsive sympathy. Because of 
Paul's preeminence as an interpreter of the Gos- 
pel, his words become the technical words of 
Christian speech, become factors of moment in 
moulding Christian thinking. Yet they are words 
still and as such demand translation. The de- 
mand becomes more imperative because so much 
is at stake. The Greek sense, the Pauline sense, 
the universal sense must be discovered, the one 
from the other. Their first meaning was in 
Paul's experience ; then they became his eager 
message to his fellows, then they must be made 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 69 

my own as the thought of Paul, the thought of 
Christ, the thought of salvation fitted for me. 

II. St. Paul's humanness, with its twofold 
proud background, constrained his reasoning, 
its method and its terminology, into two chan- 
nels. 

These are the Roman and the Jewish. We 
may for convenience call them the forensic and 
the rabbinic in his style. We might prefer the 
word legal to forensic were it not ambiguous. 
We say that Rome gave to the world law and 
Israel religion. But Israel's religion took the 
form of law, in commandment and ceremonial. 
When Paul uses the word law, which he does 
constantly and in a technical sense, he means 
that kind of law which Israel's religion set up. 
A religion that took the form of law he felt to 
be a failure, and found in Christianity a religion 
that was not law but grace. The civil aspect of 
law, Paul's Roman inheritance — its terminology, 
* justice,' 'testaments,' 'heirship' — suggested no 
such antagonism to grace, rather lent itself to 
make the meaning of grace clearer. The very 



I/O THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT. 

ambiguity of legal phraseology in Paul's constant 
use : its one look from the Roman side, its 
other look from the Jewish : suggests the min- 
gling in the one man of both inheritances. 

For the Roman and Jewish aspects of his 
reasoning constantly run into each other. We 
jfind it hard in many of his arguments to decide 
who is speaking, the Roman or the Jew. We 
only know it is not a man of the modern world. 
Justification is a term of distinct forensic bear- 
ing, but Paul's affirmations of justification draw 
their illustrations largely from the Old Testa- 
ment. The cross, with its nails and its shame, 
is a Roman punishment, but on it hung the 
Lamb of the Jewish sacrifice. Hardly do we 
know which in Paul to put first. If we defer to 
Rome's greatness, and claim him first as a 
Roman, it is not that he himself would claim 
his Roman citizenship as his proudest title, or 
that he makes most use of Roman phraseology 
in telling the supreme secret of his heart. 

Yet, at least in idea, the Roman citizen and 
the Pharisee of the Pharisees are distinguish- 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY I /I 

able. In the Roman Is seen pride, confidence, 
world-domination ; these marked Paul the man. 
In thought the Influence of Rome on the phras- 
ing of Christian theology came much later; but 
Paul would have claimed Greek influence for 
Rome, counting both as non-Jewish. It is more 
in his habits of thought than in the words he 
uses that Paul shows his Roman training. Into 
the forms — shall we call them shackles ? — of his 
own minute rabbinic training Paul's thinking 
about his Christian discipleship was compelled 
to be brought. We sometimes wish that ** firm 
as his grasp Is of truths unspoken before, and 
glorious as are his outbursts of thanksgiving for 
an emancipated nature — that he would let them 
speak for themselves. Instead of trying to extort 
them from cross questionings of Hagar and 
Ishmael, or striking again the desert rock to 
make them flow." * From this rabbinic vesting 
we are equally compelled to disentangle them 
anew if we would learn from Paul the way of 
penitence and pardon for ourselves. 



* Martineau. Seat of Authority in Religion, 294, 



172 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Roman and Jewish Influence alike are no 
part of the world's final form of Christianity : Its 
worship, its thinking about God and Christ and 
man, its standard of ideal goodness seen in 
Hebrew as blamelessness, in Roman as valor. 
These forms of its early presentment at the 
hands of its most perfect convert may interest 
us as archaic studies, as historic illustrations, as 
ingenious bits of logic or splendid bursts of 
rhetoric — the universal Gospel for the universal 
man has yet to be found by eliminating feelings 
and figures and processes of thought of even a 
master disciple. '' The belief that metaphysical 
theology," writes Dr. Hatch in the Hibbert lec- 
tures of 1888, *' is part of divine revelation has 
been Christianity's damnosa hereditas. It has 
given to later Christianity that part of it which 
is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it 
lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many 
souls." * The extent of the influence of this 
traditional theology, whose parentage is traced 



^ Hatch. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon 
Christian Church, 138. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 173 

to Paul by every theologian of every school ; the 
bondaofe from which we are beinor at last 
brought into a land of better promise ; the thral- 
dom it even yet exercises ; the hindrance of its 
unreal phrases to our own pleas with men to 
take Christ as Master ; the obstacle to our 
brother's understanding and acceptance of the 
grace of God that bringeth salvation ; are reason 
and urgency for separating the temporary ele- 
ments from Paul's teaching. We cannot plead 
in extenuation that each age and each school 
has misunderstood him ; cannot appeal from 
Paul misinterpreted to Paul as he himself 
speaks, till we have addressed ourselves to the 
honest task of distinguishing Paul the Christian 
from Paul the Roman and the Jew. It all 
issues in unrealness, in the assertion of facts 
about our religious life we do not for one 
moment believe. It may well be that we no 
longer hold and teach that Christ suffered the 
penalties of the damned, and quote Paul's 
*' made him to be sin for us ; " we may have dis- 
carded the antinomian heresy that there is no 



1/4 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

righteousness but imputed righteousness, and 
that all the good acts of unenlisted Christians 
are filthy rags, though Paul's fervid reasonings 
lend us text after text for such immoral, and 
may I say, un-Christly, ethics. But we are still 
under the bondage of religious conceptions, on 
the one hand sacrificial, on the other hand legal- 
istic, from which the gift of imagination, the 
power to put ourselves in Paul's place should 
long since have released us. Old things have 
passed away. The obsolete has been con- 
demned. The same freedom that Paul exercised 
in dealing with Old Testament conceptions 
while retaining their forms of expression would 
put him in the forefront, were he now Chris- 
tianity's teacher, in condemning our slavish 
adherence to his own passing phraseology. " It 
appears to be the tragical lot of mankind, that of 
the great performances of their historical heroes 
it is always the limited and transient form rather 
than the eternal ideal substance which in the 
first instance receives chief attention. As in 
ecclesiastical Catholicism the dogmatic form of 



IN PAUDS THEOLOGY 175 

Paulinism was preserved, so at the Reformation 
a similar fate befell revived Paulinism in the 
new scholasticism of orthodox Protestant be- 
lief." * 

All reasoning processes have necessarily a 
taint of temporariness. They must be touched 
into spiritual life to become permanent. Bare 
logic, however convincing to the intelligence, 
does not appeal to the will. Paul never rested 
on his argument alone. He felt and expressed 
the spiritual purpose to which it ministered. 
Amid his most intricate reasonings in the 
Epistle to the Romans he breaks forth into 
thanksgiving for the truth he is discovering ; and 
closes the subtle argument of the whole Epistle 
with five beautiful chapters, more than a third 
part of the Epistle, of practical conclusions 
based on his entire course of thought, how 
Christians should behave. The elaborated 
argument for imputed righteousness brings him 
out to the persuasion *' that neither death, nor 



* Pfieiderer, The Influence of Paul on Christianity, 230. 



176 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall 
be able to separate us from the love of God, 
which Is In Christ Jesus our Lord." * As we 
read, there Is much difficult argument over which 
we stumble. As we conclude, there Is only 
power from on high for right living over which 
we rejoice. Which things are an allegory, 
wherein we may see for all time how to read the 
Epistles of St. Paul. Shall we keep on worship- 
ping his processes and missing his conclusions, 
conning his arguments and desplrituallzing their 
purpose ? 

Robert Edward Bartlett, to whose Bampton 
lectures on the Letter and the Spirit reference 
was made in the first lecture, and from whom I 
have already frequently quoted, makes an admir- 
able presentation of this feature In Paul's writ- 
ings — a noble conclusion reached by processes 
that seem to us as fanciful and illogical. In his 



Rom. VIII : 38-39. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 177 

argument for Israel's Election "he comes round 
to the great conclusion that God's mercy is over 
all His works ; that He has concluded all, Jews 
and Gentiles alike, in unbelief, that He may 
have mercy upon all. But on his way to this 
conclusion he has given utterance to expressions 
which, if regarded not as obiter dicta, but as 
fundamental principles, may easily be made the 
basis of a system fatal to all effective belief in 
God's love and righteousness. — ' He hath mercy 
on whom He will, and whom He will He 
hardeneth.' ' What if God, willing to show His 
wrath and to make His power known, endured 
with much long suffering vessels of wrath fitted 
unto destruction ? ' These and like phrases, 
taken by themselves and exalted into theological 
dogmas, have agitated the Christian Church for 
centuries with barren controversies, and filled 
men's minds with dark thoughts of God." * No 
phrases of theology are final. They partake of 
the perishable character of all human effort, of 



* Bartlett. The Letter and the Spirit, d^. 



178 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

the very intensity of the age in which they origi- 
nated. Paul's logical processes share this tem- 
porary element : they are his own endeavor to 
explain and measure up to the supreme truths 
revealed to him and by him. 

These facts established in our minds : St. 
Paul's reasonings the effort to voice and drive 
home his deep Christian convictions ; the exist- 
ence in his reasoning of two elements, a Roman 
and a Jewish, both his birthright, both dwelt 
upon with pride ; the inevitable temporary color 
given to his theology, and through him to all 
Christian theology as its patron saint ; let us 
read his Epistles anew to let the light of these 
considerations shine into his message. 

The thought once conceived, its verification Is 
met on every page, occasioning in us both sur- 
prise and a sense of difficulty. Such examina- 
tion, to be of any real service in a single lecture, 
must content Itself with a few characteristic 
passages. By their detailed study a clue is 
found for other like passages as our reading 
meets with them. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1/9 

III. Roman or Forensic lines of Argument. 

We will take examples of the Roman or 
Forensic argument first. This was not probably 
the more important factor in Paul's style, the 
influence of his Jewish training being more per- 
suasive, but the Roman is strong in some very 
characteristic Pauline teaching. 

I. Adoption. 

Five times in his Epistles Paul uses the word 
adoption, viodeaia, '' that we might receive the 
adoption of sons." * The phrase has been taken 
bodily into the Prayer Book, " are made thy 
children by adoption and grace : " and in the 
thanksgiving of the Baptismal Office, **we yield 
thee hearty thanks that it hath pleased thee to 
receive him for thine own child by adoption." 

The modern Implication of adoption marks 
the relationship, to use the least disparaging 
term, as one of an artificial character. An 
adopted child is one who has no natural ties with 
his legal parent. He is adopted to take the 

* Gal. IV: 5. 



I So THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

place of children, because there are in the house- 
hold no children of Its own. Is our theology to 
take its tone from this modern conception be- 
cause Paul used the word adoption ? Is the 
supreme truth that God is our Heavenly Father 
and that all men are his children, to be emptied 
of beauty and gladness — His children, yes ! but 
only His adopted children? The word has 
tended to lose from Christian thinking just the 
blessing that Christ revealed and that Paul 
cherished. Are we to force a literal notion of 
adoption, and that a modern notion, into our 
Christian theology, and so lower our conception 
of God's relationship to men ? 

Adoption is with us a comparatively rare 
social incident. With the Jews, as a legal tran- 
saction, it was absolutely unknown. " The family 
records of the chosen people were kept with 
scrupulous care, In order that the lineage of the 
Deliverer might be Identified. Fictitious kin- 
ship could manifestly find no recognition In He- 
brew genealogies." 

With the Romans adoption occupied a very 



IN PA UVS THEOLOG V 1 8 1 

different place. Its ceremonies were among 
the most prominent of legal recognition. The 
adopted son was in the family exactly as if he 
had been born in it. Adoption made him more 
a member of the family than descendants through 
the female line, and so far annihilated preexist- 
ing personality as to operate for the extinction 
of debts. Adoption constituted as complete a 
bar to intermarriage as relationship by blood.* 

St. Paul, trained as he was in Roman practices, 
made use of this word adoption to express a new 
and glorious idea which his conversion had 
brought home to him. " This metaphor was his 
translation into the language of Gentile thought 
of Christ's great doctrine of the New Birth. He 
exchanges the physical metaphor of regeneration 
for the legal metaphor of adoption. By the aid 
of this figure the Gentile convert was enabled to 
realize in a vivid manner the fatherhood of God, 
the brotherhood of the faithful, the obliteration 
of past penalties, the right to the mystic inher- 



* St. Paul and the Roman Law. W. E. Ball, 4-6. 



1 82 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT. 

itance."* He distinguished man's relation to 
God's Fatherhood from Christ's by naming 
Christ as a son by nature and man as a son by 
adoption, both sonships sharing a common noble- 
ness. By the use of the term he exalts rather 
than disparages man's sonship. The same is 
true of allied words that gain their significance 
in large measure from association with adoption, 
such as testament, inheritance, assurance, spon- 
sorship. Their use is to be explained from 
Roman forensic usages. Their abiding meaning 
is to be found in Roman use again and again 
Christianized. 

When Paul, with the best words with which 
he was familiar, lifted the meaning of man's son- 
ship to God far above its previous signification, 
we are not to drop it, because the word he uses 
has changed its meaning, below Paul's purpose. 
Men were potentially sons before Christ's com- 
ing, though actually slaves. The chains of their 
slavery were struck off, and they were formally 



* St. Paul and the Roman Law. W. E. Ball, 5-6. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 83 

adopted into the place where they already be- 
longed. Robertson's explanation of baptism is 
at least a permissible view, that In baptism, 
** made a child of God," means proclaimed — he 
cannot be crowned king who is not king already. 
Father, Son, mean something different, some- 
thing new, something more than procreation and 
descent, when God is found to be Father and 
Jesus found to be Son, and man to have a share 
in that sonship and brotherhood. If the noble 
word adoption helped Paul to this truth of Chris- 
tian revelation it was good to use it ; if it hind- 
ers our embrace, we will drop the word and hold 
the truth. *' ^^z^msq ye are sons^ God sent forth 
the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, 
Abba, Father." * 

Adoption, with its closely associated terms, 
may be, perhaps, the one example of an idea in 
Paul's theology taken wholly from Rome. 
Other illustrations primarily forensic, are modi- 
fied by Jewish association. Both relationships 

* Gal. IV: 6. 



1 84 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

are affected by the further use in a Universal 
Gospel. 

2. Justification. 

The word justification used of the Heavenly 
Father's welcome for His children, is a forensic 
word, a word of courts, of legal relationships. 
In its thought it is Roman, in its application it is 
Jewish. Its forensic origin exerted a baneful 
effect even on Paul himself as a reasoner. He 
is found substituting for one legal justifier, the 
works of the law, another legal justifier, faith in 
Jesus Christ. Though in Paul's view these were 
opposites, though to him faith meant the con- 
sciousness of God's love in Jesus Christ made his 
own, yet as a forensic justifier on a line with 
works it too becomes an act of man. Belief in 
the Creed has as a consequence taken the place 
of, taken its place with, the works of the law as 
the way of man's salvation. The Jew who must 
keep the law has only given place to the Chris- 
tian who mtist believe the Creed. How utterly 
would Paul himself repudiate this result ! It 
comes from the temporary expression of a great 
truth securing permanent canonization. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 85 

Justification is a noble word, Paul's discovery, 
Luther's re-discovery, to express a noble and 
lost idea. Its nobleness is found as it throws 
off the wrappings of its origin. In great emer- 
gencies words appear as things. Retained as 
only a word, a literal word in a decadent age, it 
hides the thing, prevents its realization. There 
are signs of a wiser reading of Paul's revelation 
to-day. The way of man's salvation, which he 
expressed so honestly as Justification by Faith, 
we are pressing with new formularies, paraphras- 
ing his temporary and legalistic phrases. Har- 
mony with the divine purpose ; Social Service ; 
service of man in God's name ; sonship to the 
Heavenly Father, and brotherhood of man in 
Christ's brotherhood ; these are our day's sum- 
mons to Christian discipleship. The gift of 
prophecy is to tell the old story in fresh lan- 
guage, with figures of present day appositeness. 

IV. Jewish or Rabbinical lines of argument. 

As we pass to examples of Jewish or rabbin- 
ical lines of argument in Paul's theology, we 
remember that Paul was a rabbi and not a priest 



1 86 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

His concern, in his discussions, was with God as 
the giver of law rather than with God in the 
temple as object of worship. His language, 
even when it has to do with sacrifice, is rabbin- 
ical and not sacerdotal. Hence, his illustrations 
and aroruments are in the main from the law as 
ethical, as laying down commandments and 
enforcing penalties. In this he differs from the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 

Taking up the rabbinical side of Paul, our 
attention will be directed rather to particular 
lines of argument than to general processes of 
thought. Paul's narrower rabbinism appears in 
his logic as his Roman inheritance colors his 
theology. The rabbinical schools had their own 
peculiar ways of reasoning ; ways inconsequen- 
tial from our point of view and certainly tran- 
sient : but they were the ways of Paul's logic. 

It is true of Paul's rabbinic processes as of his 
forensic or Roman that they have deeply affected, 
perhaps injuriously, our Christian ways of think- 
ing. The whole presentation of man's sin as 
closely related to the sin of Adam, and to be 



IN- PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 8/ 

interpreted by it, is artificial and dangerous. It 
tends to relieve the individual from a sense of 
responsibility for his own wrong acts ; it pro- 
vokes from the unbeliever amusement, if not 
denial ; it fails in all persuasive power, not help- 
ing a man to realize penitence and obtain par- 
don for his own need ; but itself, since it conjures 
by the mighty name of Paul, first demanding 
explanation. It is no part of the permanent 
message of the Gospel. It may have a suitable 
historical and figurative place in our liturgies, 
though it seems incongruous to give thanks that 
a little infant has put off the old man ; but in 
our reasonings and persuasions it is antiquated. 

Still, we may say, Paul's general Old Testa- 
ment way of speaking has become endeared to 
us, using the facts and figures of sacred history 
as symbols of universal experiences. He makes, 
by very contrast with the puerile concerns of 
the barren rabbinism in which he was trained, 
great stories and great truths live. He is him- 
self working out from his traditional predilections, 
as when he finds the origin of sin to be now in 



1 88 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Adam and now in his own flesh, from which 
contrast or contradiction abiding truth must 
emerge. 

To the lines of argument by which he sup- 
ports his contentions we now turn, and find our- 
selves perplexed as Christian students and 
teachers. Reasonings, endeared to the rabbi, 
are utterly unreal to us and in the larger sense 
untrue. 

I. Rabbinical dealing with Facts. 

In dealing with facts of the Old Testament 
Paul's rabbinical training shows a complete 
indifference to history as history ; exalts unveri- 
fied tradition to an equal place in his argument 
as history itself ; deals with the persons of his- 
tory as not so much persons as symbols and 
allegories. "For they drank of that spiritual 
rock that followed them ; " * there was no rock 
that followed them, save in the imagination of 
the rabbis. '' For these women are two coven- 
ants," f Hagar to Paul being rather a mountain in 



* I Cor. X : 4. 
t Gal, IV : 24, 



IN PA UVS THEOLOG Y 1 89 

Arabia than the wife of Abraham and mother of 
Ishmael. Abraham himself is twice introduced 
in an elaborate exposition as an example of justi- 
fication by faith and not by law, the whole argu- 
ment turning on Abraham's priority to Moses. 
But the value of a truth does not lie in its 
priority in time but in its essential character. 
'' Christian doctrine rests finally, not on theories 
of what man was or was not in prehistoric times, 
but on the indubitable realities of experience." * 
This method of dealing with Old Testament 
people and narratives as primarily embodying 
the revelations of the Gospel, is harmless 
enough if treated with comparative indifference. 
If only we had the courage to be as free with 
Paul, rabbi and reasoner, as he with patriarchs 
and kings ! Christian thinking has fastened a 
yoke upon the neck of Christian disciples neither 
Paul nor we are able to bear. Arguments casual 
and temporary, such as Paul the rabbi was him- 
self yielding to Paul the apostle, are made, if not 



Forrest. The Christ of History and of Experience, 271. 



190 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

articles of the Christian faith, yet steps in Chris- 
tian discipleship. Adam and Abraham and 
Esau and Moses, their vivid personaHties and 
splendid service to their own time obscured by 
rabbinical glosses, have been laid upon our 
Christianity as abstract ideas which we must 
accept or else miss salvation. Paul himself 
would be foremost in decrying such slavery to 
the letter, and properly plead his own use with 
the Old Testament against It. 

2. Rabbinical methods of exegesis. 

In close relation with his handling of the per- 
sons and stories of the Old Testament is Paul's 
handling of the text. Paul is an exegete rather 
than a philosopher. He reaches his conclusions 
by an appeal to Old Testament texts and he 
deals with those texts after a purely rabbinical 
fashion. His conclusions are of permanent 
value, are inspired truths revealed from God at 
Paul's hands. His methods of defence are 
purely human, lend no support to the conclu- 
sion, require themselves study and apology. 
They are not ways of reasoning acceptable or 



INPAUVS THEOLOGY IQI 

even true to our thinking. Other and Hving 
supports for the great truths set forth must be 
found afresh in each age. So philosophy is 
summoned to defend the being of God, the free- 
dom of the will, the moral authority by fresh 
arguments as the old become discredited. The 
same powers he had used in denouncing Jesus 
as a fanatic and blasphemer before his conver- 
sion Paul now used to proclaim Him as Re- 
deemer and to glory in His cross, but they were 
powers limited by his technical training. 

When, in writing to the Galatians, he repre- 
sents the promise made to Abraham as spoken 
to his seed, he adds, '' He saith not. And to 
seeds, as of many ; but as of one. And to thy 
seed, which is Christ." * The whole argument 
turns on the use of a noun in the singular num- 
ber. But the noun is collective and refers to 
the posterity of Abraham as a whole, not to any 
individual The prophet's eye may see the in- 
dividual as alone fulfilling the promise, but the 

* Gal. Ill, i6. 



192 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

grammarian and the logician cannot find him in 
the singular number, *' seed." 

Scattered through the whole tenth chapter of 
the Epistles to the Romans, in which the Apos- 
tle deals, his heart full of tenderness, with the 
problem of Israel's unbelief and consequent 
rejection, are quotations from the Old Tes- 
tament. Verses 5-8 contain quotations from 
Moses in the Law, intermingled with sayings of 
Paul in the Gospel. These quotations, we may 
say, as the readers felt, have a good sound. 
They are taken from the Septuagint and not 
from the Hebrew. They are apparently from 
memory, being singularly inexact. Worst im- 
peachment of all, they are used not only with a 
meaning differing from that of their original 
purpose, but conveying its exact opposite. 
'* For Moses writeth that the man that doeth 
the righteousness which is of the law shall live 
thereby. But the righteousness which is of 
faith saith thus " — this last sentence is Paul in 
the Gospel, then he takes up Moses again, and 
quotes what he says of the law as though it 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 1 93 

were said of the Gospel — '' Say not In thine 
heart, Who shall ascend into heaven ? or, Who 
shall descend Into the abyss ? But what salth 
it ? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and 
in thy heart " * — then Paul drops Moses, yet 
goes right on — '* that is, the word of faith which 
we preach." If you can rescue this quotation 
from its intricacies of Moses and Paul, of Law 
and Gospel, you will find Its method, as Dr. 
Sanday says In the International Commentary, 
''the same as, and as good as, that of the rabbis, 
but no better. — As an expounder of religion 
Paul belonged to the whole world and to all 
time ; as a logician, he belonged to the first 
century. * * * p^u] isolates one side of his 
argument in one place, one in another, and just 
for that very reason, we must never use isolated 
texts. "^ * * The doctrinal deductions must be 
made at the end of Chapter XI and not of 
Chapter IX." f 



* Deut. XXX ; 12-14. 

f Sanday. Romans, International Commentary, 304, 
267 ? 



194 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Illustrations of such modes of reasoning, to 
be found in every Epistle, do not militate 
against the splendor of Paul's arguments, or 
their convincing power as a whole. Only in the 
lesser logic we find processes to be discounted 
as temporary, for which must be substituted 
modes of apology calculated to appeal to our 
time. The monuments of ancient architecture 
are beyond criticism ; in many of their interior 
adaptations modern science may suggest im- 
provements. Christ did redeem us from the 
law — that is the glorious discovery of St. 
Paul, set forth at length and from varied 
points of approach in Galatians, Corinthians and 
Romans. To our reading the burden of the 
law is felt to have even a wider application than 
Paul realized, and Christ's deliverance has 
reached on to needs he did not know, and the 
rationale of the release finds explanations to 
which the Epistles can only minister a stimulus. 
V. There remain, for our thought in this lect- 
ure, some practical passages in Paul's writings, 
partly figures of rhetoric, partly advice on be- 



IN PAUL'S THEOLOGY 195 

havior, that illustrate temporary features In St. 
Paul, which we must learn, as we have the right, 
to put In the background. 

1. It has been aptly suggested that Paul's 
favorite illustration of the Christian life by 
military figures has occasioned an unfortunate, 
at least an overabsorbing, adoption of that 
figure in Christian hymns, and in Christian pro- 
fession. That a figure is Scriptural, while it 
lends sacredness, may obscure rather than make 
plain a truth or an act. Our modern Christian 
illustrations would be more naturally taken from 
society or from sanitation. In his figures, Paul 
was far less human and universal than his 
Master. Paul went through the Roman world 
seeing nothing but men at their work, having 
apparently no eye for nature or art. Jesus 
Christ, in his limited area of Palestine, was alive 
to the beauty of flower and stream, loved the 
mountain side apart, and the plays of little 
children. 

2. In his Epistles, as being letters of counsel 
to Christian converts of his own apostleship, 



196 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Paul is compelled to give practical advice on 
minute details. These relate not alone to 
morals, but to passing customs and the need 
of special localities. They are of the nature of 
sumptuary legislation, which is discredited in 
our time, finding its only reason in temporary 
emergency. An unreasoning reverence for 
every word of Scripture fastens these usages on 
states of life for which they have no meaning. 
This brings the Bible, and the Christian Church 
so handling it, into merited condemnation. 

In a most striking and difficult passage in the 
First Epistle to the Corinthians,* Paul bids 
men keep their heads uncovered in church, and 
women covered. He enforces his instructions 
by an elaborate and complicated argument. Its 
culmination, '* For this cause ought the woman 
to have power on her head because of the 
angels," has taxed the diligence and ingenuity 
of Scriptural scholars. It surely is both a 
rabbinical style of argument and a rabbinical 



* I Cor. XI : 2-16, 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY 197 

use of an Old Testament legend. The not- 
able feature In the passage is Its Influence on 
the customs of Christendom. In Christian 
assemblies through all the ages, no matter what 
the climate or the local conditions, men go 
uncovered and women are covered because Paul 
so advised the Church In Corinth. And a 
Christian bishop directs that female candidates 
for confirmation In America, wear some sort of a 
veil, which should be provided at public expense, 
because It was a shame for a woman to be 
uncovered in heathen and dissolute Corinth. 
Herein surely Is the perpetuation of a temporary 
injunction which misses the Apostle's noble and 
permanent principle, that the usage of Chris- 
tians should not go counter to the social habits 
of the communities where they live. In Paul's 
writings, as in Christ's teachings, the principle Is 
to be discovered and applied. Its application 
will vary from that of another age and people, 
perhaps be the exact opposite. 

We may well let Paul interpret himself. We 
no longer feel it unsafe to hold him mistaken 



198 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

about Christ's second coming in his earlier 
Epistle to the Thessalonians. '* We that are 
alive shall be caught up in the clouds, to meet 
the Lord in the air ; " * and correcting it in his 
dying words to Timothy, *' For I am now ready 
to be offered, and the time of my departure is at 
hand."f We may still emphasize Justification, 
the Death of Christ, and the Cross, Paul's 
divine legacy to Christian faith and hope ; but 
he himself will help us to read new meanings 
into these. Let Paul speak once again to us, in 
our language and after our needs. Let his 
enthusiasm be contagious and perpetual, but it 
was an enthusiasm appealing to no earthly or 
sordid passion, it was an enthusiasm for the one 
thing that cannot die out of the world, but lives 
on with fresh fervor and new expression, the 
enthusiasm which Paul terms '' the love of 
Christ." 

As we read, again and again, with new wonder 



* I Thess, IV : 17, 
f II Tim. IV : 6. 



IN PAUVS THEOLOGY I99 

and new gladness, the story of that love, which 
Paul had made his own and so become a new 
man, which he strove with all his gifts and train- 
ing to make clear to others, we find, to para- 
phrase a great word of Dean Stanley In his 
lecture on Abraham, '' the hands are the hands 
of the rabbinic Saul ; but the voice is the voice 
of Paul the Apostle — the voice which still makes 
itself heard across deserts and continents and 
seas ; heard wherever there is a conscience to 
listen, or an imagination to be pleased, or a sense 
of reverence left amongst mankind." * 



* Stanley's Jewish Church, Vol. I, p. 13. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT IN THE 
APOCALYPTIC STYLE. 

I. The Fact of that Style. 

I. In New Testament times a style prevailed, 
particularly In religious writing, that Is far 
aloof from the style in general use with us, and 
one difficult to understand. It had come as an 
inheritance from the Sacred Writings of the 
past. Its first appearance in canonical literature 
is the Book of Daniel ; and two hundred years 
later the closing Book of the New Testament 
Canon, the Book of Revelation, employed the 
same style. The name of this literature Is apoc- 
alyptic. The apocalyptic style Is not confined 
to these two canonical books. It marks books 
associated with both Testaments, within and 
without the so-called Apocrypha. We recall, as 
examples, the Book of Enoch and the Revela- 
tion of Peter. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 201 

Not only does the apocalyptic style appear as 
the characteristic mark of some books, it also is 
a permeating" note in many writings which are 
not spoken of as apocalyptic. This could hardly 
fail to be so since its use was current and 
accepted — thus an apocalyptic style runs through 
the utterances of Christ and the writings of 
Paul. 

This is a literary phenomenon requiring care- 
ful examination as we separate the temporary 
from the permanent. We must determine how 
far such a style conceals and how far it reveals 
the truth : what allowance should be made in our 
interpretation of the truth thus expressed ; how 
far its phraseology and atmosphere should be 
part of the abiding message of religion. In a 
word the separation of the temporary from the 
permanent finds such marked exemplification in 
the apocalyptic style as to give warrant for de- 
voting a special hour to its study. 

2. What is this apocalyptic style In which two 
books of the Bible are wholly written, whose 
influence is felt in so much of the treasured 



202 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT. 

teachings of other books, and which left the 
sacredness of its method to many books barely 
omitted from the canon in either Testament ? 

Apocalypse is an uncovering of something 
hidden, a revelation of something unknown. 
John's Apocalypse is not the only revelation. 
The emphasis of this definition is to be laid, in 
either clause, on the last member. The thing 
hidden which is now uncovered, the something 
unknown which is now revealed, that was what 
the earnest Jew and Christian valued ; the mys- 
tery made clear rather than the method of dis- 
closing it. 

The word apocalypse Is closely associated with 
the word eschatology. Eschatology is the sci- 
ence of the Last Things. The association is so 
close that in practical use, while the words are, of 
course, not synonymous, they mutually suggest 
each other. Eschatological subjects are uniformly 
treated in the apocalyptic style. The last 
things : Death, the Intermediate state, Resur- 
rection, Judgment, Heaven, Hell ; these mys- 
teries are handled in a mysterious style. Both 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 203 

subjects are before us in this lecture. Escha- 
tology — the idea ; Apocalypse — its method of 
expression. All the mysteries that men want to 
know about : what lies before them ; the out- 
come of what now is ; the issue for the man, the 
nation, the world, the soul ; the whole problem 
gathered by the Seer into the one transcendent 
word Life. These are the interests of escha- 
tology as a philosophy, and of apocalypses as a 
style. You see how wide a range the subject 
covers. The centre of gravity of early Christian 
faith and doctrine was eschatology, Jesus has 
added the fate of the world and of the soul to 
the earlier interest in the fate of Israel alone. 

The characteristics of the apocalyptic style, as 
It deals with these mysteries, are : 

(i.) The use of figures, material figures, 
often gross, always intense. 

(2.) A fantastic habit, of which the best that 
may be said is that it is highly artificial. 

(3.) Enigmatic utterance. This perhaps be- 
comes the most distinctive mark of the apocalyp- 
tic style, largely because it gave most pleasure ; 



204 THE TEMPORAR V AND THE PERMANENT 

the reader was set to solving the puzzle. In 
the solution he, and countless generations of his 
successors, busied at the same pious task, lost all 
sense of the spiritual message In their Ingenious 
guesses about the meaning of its expression. A 
puzzle — does Its difficult solution pay busy 
people? It is such a different kind of figure 
from the Master's gracious parables ; the study 
of these ennobles in the very process. Daniel's 
** weeks," and '' the number of the beast " are but 
samples. May not the permanent reading of 
the Bible leave their solving, at least as a spirit- 
ual value, out of account ? When Christian piety 
comes to its Holy Week, it may better read the 
simple record of the Evangelists how Jesus suf- 
fered than con over the meaning of Daniel's 
vision ; " After the three-score and two weeks 
shall the anointed one be cut off — and he shall 
make a firm covenant with many for one week 
and in the midst of the week he shall cause the 
sacrifice and oblation to cease."* For the full, 

*Dan. IX : 26-27. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 205 

perfect and sufficient sacrifice has been offered 
for the sin of the whole world. Nor can we 
subscribe to the assertion of the Book of Revela- 
tion : " Here is wisdom : let him that hath 
understanding count the number of the beast : 
for it is the number of a man ; and his number 
is six hundred three-score and six."* Whatever 
the dread of the seer over Roman tyranny, we 
can without danger say Nero, and not 666, if we 
mean Nero. 

(4). A sense of superiority. A confidence 
amounting almost to arrogance appears in the 
apocalyptic style. Daniel's modesty saves him 
from such apparent arrogance, even more than 
we find in the book of Revelation. The Apoc- 
alyptist knows all about the other world, its 
times, inhabitants, occupations ; knows nothing 
about this world, its duties, its morals — as wit- 
ness the Anabaptists ; — has a lofty pity for the 
ignorant whom he does not propose to enlighten 
unless they acquire his shibboleth. 



* Rev, XIII: 18. 



2o6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

(5). Conjuring by phrases. The favorite 
words of the apocalyptic style recur again and 
again ; and as the style has found a later follow- 
ing have become a cherished heavenly termin- 
ology. The Kingdom, the Coming of Christ, the 
Day of Judgment, the last Assize, the Millen- 
nium : not to count the lesser spirits — the 
Dragon, the Scarlet Woman ; and again the first 
and second Resurrection, and ' Jerusalem ' as 
summing up all possible blessings. 

3. The influence of the apocalyptic style lasts 
on. — It carries over from the Old Testament to 
the New, from the New Testament to Christian 
thinking, features both in their expression and 
in their existence utterly obsolete. It has 
fastened on to Christianity a passing, shall we 
say a grotesque, conception of religion, with 
what appears to be a permanent hold. To our 
religious thought, personal religion has become 
a scheme, and in that scheme looms up, some- 
times as its consummation, oftener as its warn- 
ing. Death and the Second Coming and the 
Last Day. Our aptitude for spiritual duty sur- 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 20/ 

renders to a consecrated Waiting, under the 
spell of the same Inheritance. And our Chris- 
tian reasoning on the method of the divine gov- 
ernment is moulded in the same distorted and 
unreal conception. 

You may say that, after all, our Christianity 
does not take seriously its apocalyptic inherit- 
ance. Deal with men as preacher or pastor; 
deal with your own soul in the attempt to formu- 
late your Christian conceptions, and see ! Let 
the season of Advent recur ; let the stated re- 
vival time of Lent come round or a special revival 
be stirred in your midst by God's Spirit ; — 
Christian life will make the endeavor to form 
itself on these same unsolved and outgrown 
enigmas, and Christian thinking labor to corres- 
pond thereto. There is a distinct loss in trying 
to mould Christian life and Christian belief after 
these outgrown and unmeaning fashions. As 
matter of fact we do not become good that way, 
nor believe in those things as Christian realities. 
Yet what is it to be a Christian, how does one 
become a Christian, what does the Christian 



2o8 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

believe at bottom about the future of the soul's 
life? Why do we keep on talking as if these 
apocalyptic methods were Christianity's perma- 
nent blessing ? Why do we not find present 
day ways of telling present day experiences ? 
This is all the Christianity that many presum- 
ably Christian people have. It may be put in 
one vigorous term — it is a religion of Catastro- 
phes : Something outside his own power, hap- 
pening to a man when he is converted, w^hen he 
comes to himself in judgment and immortality. 
It is what we give as religion to our children, to 
our fellows coming to us with inquiry or criti- 
cism. Its prevalence imparts an unreality to our 
whole religious life. Unreal though it be, it is 
vehemently contended for. We need not point 
to Montanists of Tertullian's time, or to the 
Chiliasts of the tenth century, or to the Second 
Adventist of one hundred years ago. The 
early years of my own ministry were fired with a 
millenial revival. I have yet on file sermons of 
my own aglow with the ardor of conferences in 
which the elder Tyng and other of our wise 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 209 

fathers and brethren went the full length of 
identifying the Christian Gospel with its apoc- 
alyptic shroud. 

We go further. Such an identification is a 
disloyalty to the Gospel itself. That disloyalty 
was avowed in these notable conferences of 
which I speak, held in the later seventies. The 
disloyalty takes the form of discouragement and 
distrust as it begins by pronouncing the Gospel 
of the Incarnation a failure. A tone of regret 
over that failure changes almost into a tone of 
exultation: **we find," it seems to say, "this 
failure to have been expected and anticipated. 
What Jesus could not accomplish by His life 
and death and resurrection and giving of His 
Spirit at Pentecost He will now accomplish by 
some new and awful phenomenon. He is about 
to appear in the clouds, and awe into submission 
by such an Epiphany, those whom He could not 
win by His earlier manifestation." So a blaze 
of glory shall succeed, where a life spent going 
about doing good has failed. Is that the Gospel ? 
"The Galilean Prophet" says Martineau "had 



2IO THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

been taken into retreat till He could fulfil the 
prophecies." * Even an earlier prophet could 
have told us that God's highest manifestation of 
Himself is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, 
nor in the thunder, but in the still small voice. 
If God may not save man by manifesting Him- 
self in man as man, then man must go unsaved ; 
for the Incarnation of the Son of God is the 
one complete divine manifestation that has been 
vouchsafed us. A catastrophic religion misses 
the very secret of the Gospel, fails to be a per- 
manent religion. 

4. All this said and said strongly, it remains 
to be said and with equal earnestness that the 
apocalyptic idea and style alike have their value. 

We can spare neither Daniel nor Revelation 
as books, nor yet the apocalyptic phraseology as 
it is scattered through the Bible, from our 
Sacred Volume. A broader wisdom than we 
have thus far been criticizing in this lecture has 
retained it. It only requires in its use a censor- 



* Martineau. Seat of Authority of Religion, 395, 



IlSr THE APOCAL YPTIC STYLE 211 

ship which values its word, but fears not to pass 
judgment where judgment is necessary. 

We must put the Apocalypse, whether book 
or style, in its right place : not with history, 
with record of fact, or with prose ; but with 
poetry and vision. In its literary aspect we 
should deal with it as we deal with hymns. We 
do not sing theology, though hymn-writers often 
try to force their theology on us under that 
guise. If it be a good hymn the whole Chris- 
tian world will unite in singing it, and discount 
its theology as temporary. We Christian teach- 
ers and thinkers today are never to fail in our 
consciousness that the historic Creeds are prima- 
rily great hymns of praise : therein they stand 
apart from temporary Confessions of Faith, and 
therefore belong to universal Christianity. 

Poetry and vision are invaluable, but their 
truth and comfort are to be disentangled from 
any passing expression of it ; that expression took 
its color from the outward circumstances as well 
as from the culture and intelligence of the age 
in which it appeared. " It is, indeed, worth 



212 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

noticing," writes Bartlett in the Letter and 
the Spirit, " to how great an extent Christian 
eschatology has been moulded by such circum- 
stances. In days of oppression and persecution 
men have drawn comfort and hope from the 
thought that Christ's coming could not be long 
delayed, and have cried, ' Lord Jesus come 
quickly,' and have looked eagerly for the sign 
of the Son of Man in heaven. In days when 
theology was systematized and the Kingdom of 
Heaven assumed the form of a feudal monarchy, 
men imagined a magnificent and glorified court 
of justice, in which apostles, martyrs, confessors, 
monks, and virgins should sit as assessors, or 
more than assessors with the Judge, and should 
take part in the judgment of the nations who 
should be gathered at the judgment Seat." * 
This passing phraseology remains a treasure 
despite its temporary features, if it be used as a 
poetic treasure, or a treasury of devotion. We 
read and shall read Keble's Christian Year, just 
as it was written, though both our ecclesiastical 



* Bartlett, The Letter and the Spirit, 68,69. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 213 

and theological conceptions may have parted 
from his. We read the Imitation, and Holy 
Living and Dying, just as they are written, to 
warm our present-day piety, though its exact 
expression does not correspond to either our 
feeling or our reason. We quote the precise 
language of what has been long treasured, or 
is a world master-piece, making the quotation a 
source of inspiration and comfort for times and 
thoughts far removed. Passing conscientious 
judgment on the worthlessness for Christian edi- 
fication of much of the book of Revelation, we 
come back at the bedside of the sick, in the 
house of the mourner, when we summon the 
awakened soul to Christian discipleship, to its 
matchless pictures ; we repeat its words with a 
tenderness never lost from our hearts ; we sing 
of pearly gates and heaven built walls with a 
new resolve to run with patience the race that is 
set before us, " And the Spirit and the bride say, 
Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. 
And let him that is athirst come. And whoso- 
ever will, let him take the water of life freely." * 
* Rev. XXII : 17. 



214 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

The value that we thus put on apocalyptic 
writing in the New Testament, a value best 
illustrated by the use we make of poetry, is 
closely allied to the service rendered to religion 
by mysticism. Christian thought has modified 
its attitude towards mysticism very markedly 
today. That attitude neither concedes every- 
thing to it on the one hand nor sweepingly con- 
demns on the other. We have grown to realize 
its place, the speciality of its gift to gifted souls, 
the message it may have to all souls in hours of 
emergency or attitudes of heart. The chapter 
headings in the English Bible, notably in the 
Song of Solomon, do not, of course, belong 
there as part of the Bible. They are intrusions, 
if you please, of some mystic editor's idea of 
the chapter's meaning. If their composer were 
a true mystic, that is possessed with inner vision, 
these headings may help the imagination as we 
read the chapter, and perhaps the interpretation 
when the primary sense has been found. 

5. In the light of these thoughts how are we 
to deal with the New Testament ? We are to 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 2 1. 5 

recognize the existence therein of an apocalyptic 
style and eschatological detail. These are in 
the New Testament because they were in the 
current religious writing and thinking of the 
Jews. Recognized, we are to pick it out, and ask 
what it means, its meaning to be learned from its 
use in the Old Testament and from the interests 
on which men's minds were set as they wrote. 
Its presence actually accepted, its meaning so far 
as possible disentangled, it remains for us to ask 
its permanent value. In deciding this we must 
fearlessly distinguish the value of poetry from 
prose, the value of the mystical from the practi- 
cal. The value may be greater than we have 
realized but it will be different, and it will 
demand a readjustment of ideas of the greatest 
moment. An unreasoned deference to the 
apocalyptic style has given wrong answers to 
such questions as : What is it to be a Christian ; 
What does God count to be goodness ; Is the 
order of the world proceeding after the divine 
plan ; Is the outlook for God's children, for 
Christ's disciples, one of courage and hopeful- 



2l6 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

ness ; Has the King come and is His Kingdom 
already set up ; or are we still without a King 
and In the realm of the Prince of the Power of 
Darkness ? 

n. Christ's use of the apocalyptic style. 

Our first concern, indeed our main inter- 
est In the subject before us, Is the use which 
Christ makes of this current apocalyptical style, 
and the influence of such use on our conception 
of Him and His teachings. 

I. We must at the outset concede the exis- 
tence of apocalyptic phrases and Ideas In our 
Lord's teaching, the assertion of Joh. Weiss 
that it Is the very centre of Christ's teaching, we 
must pronounce extravagant. '* It may be that 
Jesus was more the child of His age than we 
have been accustomed to suppose ; and ideas or 
phrases may be recovered from apocalyptic liter- 
ature which have entered into His teaching ; 
but these are no more than the particles of 
Inorganic matter which the plant takes up Into 
Its own substance and transmutes Into the forms 
of beauty. Indeed, the more the apocalyptic 



IN THE APOCAL YPTIC STYLE 2 1 7 

literature is unearthed, the more is the incom- 
parable originality of Jesus enhanced ; for noth- 
ing else in the whole range of human records is 
more utterly wearisome and worthless." * What- 
ever use He made of it He touched it into living 
power. 

Jesus* use of the Old Testament was that of a 
devout Jew who turned to it for comfort in the 
trials through which He must pass. He quoted 
its familiar language and felt therein the spirit 
of saint and wise man strengthening His own, 
sharing with Him in the very utterance His con- 
fident trust in God. This is precisely what the 
Christian does in times of trial, what he is bid- 
den do and find his comfort ; and it is to the 
language of the book of Revelation, and of the 
hymns of the Church, that he turns in the hour 
of his sorrow or his death. Jesus felt the influ- 
ence of the book of Daniel, and the appeal of its 
mystic language was more powerful to Him as 
the shadow deepened. 



* Stalker's Christology, 66-67. 



2l8 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

The Bruce Lectures on the Eschatology of 
Jesus delivered in 1903 by Lewis Muirhead are 
a singularly sympathetic appreciation of Jesus* 
use of the apocalyptic style. One or two para- 
graphs will help us. "Jesus found something 

in the book of Daniel, that responded with 
peculiar emphasis to His own knowledge of 
God and the Kingdom, that both was and was 
to be intrusted to Himself." *' The seer in 
Daniel contemplated a condition of national 
fortunes, that seemed to him, in a secular sense, 
desperate. In His discourse to the disciples 
Jesus had in view a condition of secular affairs, 
resulting from the nation's unfaithfulness to 
God, equally hopeless ; and when, speaking to 
the disciples. He cited Daniel, I understand 
Him to have meant, in effect, mainly that the 
pledge of deliverance, given in that ancient time 
to the faithful, was still valid."* 

Jesus, then, uses the style of the apocalypse 
and the language of eschatology. He uses it, 



* Muirhead Eschatology of Jesus, 80, 94, 95. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 219 

by way of quotation to comfort and explain to 
Himself His own position as ''Son of Man"; 
and by way of counsel to make that position 
clear to His disciples and to encourage them in 
carrying on the work of the '' Kingdom of God." 
You see in this last phrase with what ease we 
ourselves fall into language, to which the adjec- 
tives ''apocalyptic" and " eschatological," may 
be properly attached. I sometimes wonder 
whether our current Christianity could not be 
vitalized and be made genuine, if we foreswore 
entirely the use of " Kingdom of God," " Son of 
Man," and like traditional phrases which fall so 
glibly from the tongue and mean so little to the 
life. Yet our deeper duty is to give a new birth 
to all the old words by discovering their perma- 
nent treasure. That is what Christianity, and 
the Church rooted in history, is set to do. 

2. What Jesus spoke we know from what 
the Evangelists recorded. Both in hearing and 
recording His language all apocalyptic phrase- 
ology seems to have held a special attraction for 
them. Of course they did not write down 



220 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

everything which Jesus said. But it might 
appear that they left no utterance of His which 
possessed this apocalyptic tone unrecorded. 
Themselves under the spell of both style and 
idea, their selection of material and the form in 
which they wrote it were disproportionately 
colored by this apocalyptic style. " The disci- 
ples were not so free as the Master. They cor- 
rected prophecy. Instead of one advent of the 
Messiah they imagined two, the first in humilia- 
tion, the second in glory. The one having 
been realized, they expected the other with a 
more ardent confidence. This faith in the im- 
minent return of Christ and of the end of the 
world dominates all the thoughts as well as the 
feelings of the apostles : it determines and 
colors their Christianity, their theory of redemp- 
tion, their ethics, their idea of salvation, so that 
to expound their writings and estimate the 
worth of their reasonings, the historian must 
always read them and explain them in this 
light. It is for this reason that their Christian- 
ity merits the name of Messianic, and could not 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 221 

be, in this Jewish form, an absolute norm for all 
the ages." * 

We may be warranted therefore in holding 
that the Evangelists, notably the Synoptists, 
exaggerated the number of Jesus's apocalyptic 
sayings, at any rate showed their preference for 
such sayings by remembering and recording 
them disproportionately. 

The Master's use of the apocalyptic style was 
almost purely devotional. The Evangelist, as 
he introduces it, lingers on it, with an undue 
and curious attachment. The later New Testa- 
ment writers, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude — we 
put John one side for the time — revert to this 
as their current style of telling the Master's 
Gospel. And the Christian Church, as it con- 
structs its liturgy and lectionary, casts a longing 
look backward on its enigmatic and mysterious 
phrases. The Evangelists could make but one 
chapter of the twenty or more in their Gospels a 
Discourse by the Master on the Last Things. 



* Sabatier, Outlines of Philosophy and Religion, 193, 194. 



222 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Each Synoptist makes that chapter a long one — 
yet it is a small proportion of his Gospel. When 
the Church comes to make her lectionary she 
appoints two of those chapters, Mark xiii and 
Luke xxi, covering precisely the same ground, 
to be read in full at the solemn Sunday morn- 
ing service, besides appointing two Gospels, 
those for the Second Sunday in Advent and the 
Sixth after the Epiphany, from similar sources. 
This relegates some of Jesus' most characteristic 
and original utterances to secondary or week- 
day services. Such selection by the Church 
does not so much feed the spiritual hunger of 
her children as it reveals her own love for the 
mysterious. Better the Sermon on the Mount, 
the parable of the Prodigal Son, the comforting 
words in the Upper Chamber, twice read than 
this duplication of the Abomination of Desola- 
tion and the Signs in the Heavens for curious 
but unedified ears. A dominant note, this 
eschatological one, certainly even in the Mas- 
ter's teaching : but having its own corrective 
lodged in itself — a corrective our far-removed 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 223 



and literal hearing is unable to apply. Jesus 
consecrated an apocalyptic Messianism as He 
consecrated the law of Moses. But He spoke 
a greater word of authority which should fulfil, 
interpret, and do away with both. He did not 
undermine the assumption of the disciples, but 
He warned them of its danger, and gave them 
something better to think about. " He lodged 
a new content, a religious and moral element, 
which must in the long run make them break 
their trammels and elevate Messianism above 
itself. He did it, as in every like case, not by 
negative criticism, but by the infusion of new 
life. ''He never said either that it must be 
abandoned or that it must be retained. He 
deposited in it the new principle ; but He left in 
it many obscurities, abandoning to time and to 
the force of things the care of drawing forth 
the consequences and clearing up confusions." * 
Christianity in all the centuries has been so 



* Sabatier. Outlines of Philosophy and Religion, i88, 
189. 



224 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

inert as to still cling to the form without apply- 
ing the corrective. Till we have discovered 
what in the Master's vision of the future still 
took the form of a treasured, but fantastic piety ; 
till from the apocalyptic speech of even the 
Master Himself we have winnowed the tem- 
porary that we may save the permanent ; we 
have not found the vision that is to be the hope 
and encouragement for all time. 

There are difficulties in reconciling Jesus' 
utterances about the future. The key has by no 
means yet been found. We may busy ourselves 
over the details of that Discourse recorded so 
fully by the three Synoptists and sometimes cry 
out in exultation but more often in despair. 
Says Muirhead, '* Did Jesus not merely pro- 
phesy the fall of the Jewish state, but, contrary 
to the spirit and manner of genuine prophecy, pre- 
dict, like a soothsayer, some of the actual cir- 
cumstances? Did He say that not even the Son 
knew the day or the hour of the consummation 
of the Kingdom, and yet in the same discourse 
declare that all sure signs of the End would fall 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 22$ 

within that present generation? In reference to 
all these matters are we to see a greater or less 
degree of misunderstanding, or even conscious 
misrepresentation, on the part of the Evange- 
lists ? " * We may not allot each saying with 
precision — as has been the fond habit of recent 
exegesis — now to the destruction of Jerusalem; 
now to the individual soul ; now to the Coming 
of the Son of Man and the end of the world, 
the end of the age and the consummation of 
all things. This confident, detailed handling 
of Scripture has ceased to win approval as 
it has ceased to give satisfaction. If the word 
be apocalyptic, mysterlousness is of its very 
essence. Explained and made easy, it loses 
whatever value it possessed. 

3. We must make a more comprehensive 
examination of Jesus' sayings about the future 
than those contained in the chapters headed the 
Last Things. We have been caught by the 
phraseology and the title, and so been tempted 



^ Muirhead. Eschatology of Jesus, 10, 11. 



226 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

to feel these to be His full utterance on the 
things that are to come to pass. So reading, 
we make the marks of the Future to be only 
suddenness and immediacy. As we read again 
and with wider range, we find two distinct and 
contrasted classes of sayings. 

There are on the one hand many passages 
not merely in the distinctive discourse on the 
Last Things, but here and there throughout the 
Gospels, which speak of the End as immediate 
and sudden. But side by side with these are 
careful utterances of Christ where a deferred 
Coming is spoken of, anticipated with equal 
insistency, and represented as far-removed. A 
lengthened history is to precede it, a careful 
preparation to usher it in ; it cannot come till all 
the world of God's children has had its chance, 
** the Gospel must first be published among all 
nations:" ''till the times of the Gentiles be 
fulfilled." Gentile to have as full a chance as 
Jew! What ages of longsuffering has God 
given the Jew ! In view of such a word Paul 
himself, eager as he was for Christ's coming and 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 22/ 

long confident of its Immediacy, would never 
have consented to purchase that blessing at the 
price of failure of either Jew or Gentile first to 
hear the good news. Such parables as those of 
the Sower, the Wheat and the Tares, the 
Mustard Seed, and above all the Seed growing 
gradually — suggest a long painstaking process. 
A delayed Parousia Is the Inevitable inference 
from the Tares and the Wheat, the Selfish 
Neighbor and the Unjust Judge ; from the oft- 
repeated prayer, Thy Kingdom come ; from the 
slumbering virgins ; and more than all from the 
summons " Watch " which Is the one abiding 
key-note of Christ's outlook on the future — 
whose meaning is that man be ready, always 
ready, whenever God speaks to him, no matter 
how long He may wait. This vigorous thought 
is splendidly embodied In the twelfth chapter of 
Bruce's Kingdom of God. To Alexander Bal- 
main Bruce, though I have not quoted him in 
set phrase in these lectures, I avow myself a 
thankful and humble debtor for much of the spirit 
and thought that I am trying to express therein. 



228 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Each presentation, that of the immediate and 
of the delayed parousia, has its value, the one 
as the corrective of the other. The sudden 
and immediate are the outer marks of the things 
that are to be ; the delayed and the progressive 
belong to the inner counsels of Him who is to 
bring in that future. We have made the grave 
mistake of cherishing apocalyptic pictures apart 
from the conduct of men. There can be no 
'* comings " of any moral relation to men's lives 
that have not been prepared for. They are to 
men what men's character make them to be, and 
character is a plant of slow growth and gradual 
ripening. The Coming of Christ with all its 
manifold accompanyings, has no value for par- 
tisan purposes apart from its value in character 
making. ** He knew nothing of a shall be of the 
future, the vision of which was dissociated in 
His mind from an ought to be of the present." '^' 
** Neither shall they say, lo here ! or, lo there ! 
for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within 



* Muirhead. Eschatology of Jesus, io8. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 229 

you." * A present and a progressive stands 
over against a future and a sudden ; a human 
and a local must be ready to make a divine and 
eternal its own. 

4. It remains for us to give an interpretation 
of Christ's apocalyptic language, which may put 
His Coming and all its attendant ideals into 
harmony with the rest of the Gospel. As the 
Coming of Christ now stands it is a unique 
phenomenon to be reconciled if possible, if not 
to be explained away. It has no part either in 
helping us to be good Christians or in explain- 
ing God's great gift of His Son. It is there in 
the Gospel and must just be reconciled or left 
unreconciled. 

This proposed interpretation is a permissible 
one. Jesus Himself suggests it as a corrective 
to wrong deductions on the part of His disciples. 
The prophet Joel is so treated by St. Peter in 
his sermon on the Day of Pentecost ; when his 
word " the sun shall be turned into darkness 



* Luke XVII : 21. 



230 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

and the moon into blood," is represented as 
happening on that very day of grace. And yet 
there stood the genial sun and the smiling 
moon in the heavens. " So shall the Coming" of 

o 

the Son of Man be." 

In one word this interpretation represents 
these apocalyptic, eschatological phenomena as 
already here. These futures may all be found 
presents, and so found prove richer as spiritual 
lessons. The Day of the Lord is upon us ; not 
complete, but begun, not to be, but becoming. 
There are to be crises, epochs, notable external 
events, as signs and seals that the process is on. 
These are like great growing days in spring and 
summer time ; but the normal process is gradual, 
** first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear." The destruction of Jerusalem 
is just one world-crisis in which the sign of the 
Son of Man in the Heaven stands out more clear. 
This interpretation makes Christ's Coming, 
(i). A present fact : Christ has come, the 
Day of the Lord is here. The sign of the 
*' Son of Man " has appeared, Caiaphas saw 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 23 I 

Him coming in the heavens, when he condemned 
Him to the cross, and heard that the stone had 
been rolled away. The consummation of all 
things is upon us. Judgment has begun. He 
that is able to see It, let him see it. 

(2). A spiritual fact. How often must He 
tell this to His own, in the day of His flesh, 
when they mistook that day as a material one ! 
How often must He tell it to Christian hearts 
now, when we count and weigh religion instead 
of estimating it after its kind ! *' Spiritual " 
does not empty a fact of reality, of value. 
A ** Spiritual Presence," in the Holy Com- 
munion is to the Christian a more ** Real 
Presence " than transubstantiation and consub- 
stantiation. The danger of other emphasis 
than spiritual on Christ's Coming is seen not 
merely in the follies of fanatics ; of Adventists 
and Millenarians — theirs is not our danger, it 
is seen rather in a contempt on the part of 
those whom we would influence for what is 
regarded as necessary orthodoxy ; in holding and 
championing positions that mean nothing vital ; 



232 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

in leaving the conversion of my soul and the 
bringing of the kingdom home to me, to a 
catastrophe dropping upon me from without. 
Man loves luck, speculation, even in religion : 
we will not have it, it is not good for us. A 
God-send is not a wind-falL 

(3). A progressive fact : The fact is started, 
is now going on, the Kingdom and its King ; 
the converts and their principles : the judgment 
and its final issue. There Is nothing ahead but 
what has already begun. Looking for some- 
thing else Is a mark of disloyalty and a pledge 
of disappointment. A fuller, a more perfect, a 
better realized, but not another Coming is the 
last word of Christian theology and Christian 
living. Am I not right ? I appeal to you In 
what you really believe ; rather than what you 
say you believe ; and I ask. Does not the 
Resurrection take hold of the body that now is 
rather than of some long lost particles of dust ? 
Does not immortality follow on from life, heaven 
continue what earth has begun, rather than 
await some phenomenal day ? 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 233 

(4). The consummation of the fact is condi- 
tioned by 77tans response. God does not work 
alone In bringing in His Kingdom. Our part 
ignored or forgotten, there Is no kingdom for us 
to talk about. Providence Is not fatalism. 
Christ's Coming Is brought to fulness and made 
clearer and more real, as God's children are ful- 
filling their related duties In their place of 
service. 

III. In passing to later books of the New 
Testament, we must read them all In the light 
of the Gospel. Whatever concession Jesus 
made to the current fondness for an apocalyptic 
style; however His outlook was conditioned by 
its phraseology of mystery, all this may be 
unhesitatingly affirmed of the writers of the 
Epistles. And again whatever Interpretative 
principle illumines His utterance and makes It a 
permanent message for all mankind, we will 
gladly apply that principle to the more doubtful 
sayings of Paul and Peter. If the Master's 
future facts are also present and spiritual facts, 
the disciples' pictures must receive the same 



234 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

clarifying touch, however bound to earth their 
own vision may have been. It is rarely given 
to a prophet to see the future in its true perspec- 
tive : '' Great events crowd up close behind one 
which in actual fulfilment are widely apart in 
time." 

There can be no doubt that in the apostolic 
age there was a widely prevailing belief that the 
Second Coming of the Lord in visible form, was 
an event to be looked for in their own time. 
How far this was a natural deduction from our 
Lord's own sayings and intended by Him; and 
how far it was an exaggerated impression to 
which their own preconceptions lent themselves, 
Is matter for curious inquiry. It is entirely rea- 
sonable to believe that this ignorance of the 
early Church was permitted and that with a pur- 
pose. '* It stimulated spiritual zeal. It gave 
elasticity to apostolic institutions and ordi- 
nances." '^ It may seem a paradox," says San- 
day, **but yet it is profoundly true, that the 
Church is adapted to the needs of every age, 
just because the original preachers of Christian- 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 235 

ity never attempted to adapt it to the needs of 
any period but their own." * The corrective of 
any erroneous conclusions was to be reaHzed by 
experience. The early Christianity of Apostles 
and their converts was to be forced back on 
spiritual facts and interpretations as they found 
the uncertainty and inadequacy of their first 
material outlook. 

I. If we find St. Paul, as we seem to do, cor- 
recting his earlier impression about the Last 
Things expressed in Thessolonians by the con- 
victions of his death-hour written to Timothy, 
we only see in him a process required of each 
Christian age. Man at first prefers what comes 
to him in apocalyptic fashion. That there is 
something better for him he will discover as 
these apocalypses serve their place for his child- 
hood and leave his manhood crying out for a 
deeper, i. e., a more spiritual thing. Paul him- 
self in his own deeper thought and utterance 
threw off this bondage and found, for the great 



Sanday Romans, 381. 



236 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

experiences of the human soul, spiritual facts, to 
be more than physical. As Matthew Arnold 
says. After all, Paul's characteristic words are 
not election, predestination, justification, but 
"dying with Christ," "buried with Christ," 
"risen with Christ." Paul believed in death, 
and resurrection and life as actual, material 
facts, for Christ and man ; but he believed more 
In being dead unto sin, in being risen with 
Christ, in putting on life eternal. 

2. Need we pause with 2nd Peter and Jude ? 
Whatever message lies in their Epistles for 
man's permanent inspiration, it surely is to be 
separated from a great amount of traditional 
rabbinism such as Michael and the Devil disput- 
ing about the body of Moses, from quotations of 
cherished Apocalypses such as Enoch the 
seventh from Adam, and from phraseology run- 
ning with these to a like excess of riot. 

3. We reach the disciple who leaned on Jesus' 
bosom. The name of St. John brings us to a 
new position as regards the apocalyptic style. 

We must ask as our first question, Did the 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 237 

same hand that wrote the Fourth Gospel and 
the First Epistle write also the book called the 
Apocalypse, that is, the Revelation ? To the 
casual reader it seems impossible, and that if we 
must attribute the one to St. John we must 
refuse to him the authorship of the others. 
Not even thirty years of time, nor new scenes 
and new requirements would make a lover of 
wild imagery and fantastic mysteries out of the 
simple, affectionate, purposeful writer of the 
Gospel and the Letter. Critical scholarship 
may disinter or even manufacture resemblances 
in style and language between John's Gospel 
and the book of Revelation, just as that same 
scholarship may discover differences where Its 
eyes look out for them ; but in some questions 
of authorship the general impression of the 
sympathetic reader counts for more than techni- 
cal details. At any rate the composition of the 
books is far apart In time, and the Gospel Is the 
later written. The final word of God's Book 
is not a vision of seas and vials and beasts. 
Nor does the threat, " If any man shall take 



238 THE TEMPORA RY AND THE PERM A NENT 

away from the words of the book of this pro- 
phecy, God shall take away his part from the tree 
of life," * refer to the Holy Bible and condemn 
any tampering with its text, but to the strange 
Apocalypse, to whose enigmatic solemnities 
cotemporary religion attached undue importance. 
There is little of Christ, though some of Paul, in 
the book of Revelation. 

The writer had not much of real Importance 
to say ; what he said he spoke sonorously and 
with an ominous voice. There is in Revelation 
more of vengeance than of vision. The book 
has received a place of undue exaltation, largely 
because of our still sharing the fondness for the 
sort of literature it exemplifies and the temper 
of heart it appeals to. Its value is one of texts 
and not of truths. Not for a moment do we 
deny the beauty and helpfulness of such texts 
for the hour of sorrow and aspiration. Its value 
is, as we have said, that of poetry. Much of it 
must be passed by unused. 

* Rev. XXII : 19. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 239 

John the aged was a Seer in a deeper sense 
than the book of Revelation uncovers for us ; it 
was reserved for him, ere the Canon of the New 
Testament was finally closed, to bring out from 
the treasury of his memory and from the experi- 
ence of his life and love, the richer meaning of 
the Master. 

Our references to the Gospels in this lecture 
have been to the Synoptic Gospels since it is 
there rather than in John that we find character- 
istic apocalyptic language. It is true that 
John's memory of the Discourse at the Syna- 
gogue at Capernaum thrice records the phrase 
*' I will raise him up at the last day." * On the 
other hand Matthew gives us a most distinctive 
Johannine word. '' All things have been deliv- 
ered unto me of my Father : and no one knoweth 
the Son, save the Father; neither doth any 
know the Father save the Son, and he to whom- 
soever the Son willeth to reveal him." f This 



* John VI : 40, 44, 54. 
f Matt. XI : 27. 



240 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

does but manifest the faithfulness of their 

record, even when the word recorded did not fit 

into their plan or understanding. 

John takes the external word and touches it 

with eternal meaning. We read in John '' This 

is life eternal, that they might know thee the 

only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou 

hast sent," '^ and we realize that life eternal is a 
mark of character and not of years. We read 

that ''He that believeth on the Son hath ever- 
lasting life,"f and we realize that eternal life is 
a present gift. We read " We know that we 
have passed from death unto life, because we 
love the brethren," J and we realize that the love 
of today's brother is the test of life with God. 
We read "the hour cometh, and now is, when 
the true worshippers shall worship the Father 
in spirit and in truth/' § and we realize that the 



* John XVII : 3. 
t John III : 36. 
X I John III: 14. 
§ John IV : 23. 



IN- THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 24 1 

resurrection life and the consciousness of our 
Master is not something far off. Life, Death, 
The World, Judgment, Freedom, Eternity ; 
Father, Son and Comforter ; Tribulation, Cheer, 
Peace ; — what a transformed meaning have they 
for the Christian ! — transformed since Jesus 
spoke the words, rather since John saw what 
Jesus meant. 

These are not apocalyptic phrases, but phrases 
so to speak of mysticism ; it is John's Gospel that 
preserves for us the best in the apocalyptic 
thought and style ; all that is worth preserving 
in the apocalyptic may be said to be found in 
the mystical. Shall we say the permanent in 
the apocalyptic is the mystical ? Paul has 
helped to mediate the process. There is a 
tendency observable throughout the whole New 
Testament, as Haupt suggestively points out, 
for the word Eternal (aionios) to pass from its 
quantitive sense of endlessness into the qualita- 
tive idea of supra-earthly. This process attains 
its ripeness in John's Gospel; but ''life" and 
'* eternal " are great words with Paul as with his 



242 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

Master. Even to the plain synoptist '' Eternal 
Life " could never be the dreary dreams of his 
old teachers after he had heard it from the 
Galilean. 

IV. The Mystical and the Practical. 

The mystic is closely related to the apo- 
calyptic. Christian mysticism is eschatology 
saved from extravagance — The word mysticism 
itself needs and deserves saving: a new and 
nobler appreciation of the value of mysticism is 
a growth of Christian thinking to-day. " Re- 
newal of the study of mysticism is wholly a 
matter of rejoicing." 

Christian mysticism has been defined as the 
doctrine or rather the experience of the Holy 
Ghost. The mystic is one who has the Inner 
witness. The mystic sees things to the bottom. 

These are splendid claims : the experience of 
the Holy Ghost ; the witness in one's self ; seeing 
things as they are. Historically, however, mys- 
ticism has framed for Itself a far narrower 
definition or aim, realizing a part of the gift of 
the divine spirit at the expense of the Avhole. 



IN THE APOCAL YPTIC STYLE 243 

Any emphasis in mysticism that sets it over 
against simple Christianity is such a narrowing 
and exclusive claim. '* In proportion as mystic- 
ism either claims to be, or is regarded by ordi- 
nary Christians as being, an abnormal by-way or 
by-region of special experience, rather than the 
realization in special fulness of that which is the 
central inspiration and meaning of all Christian 
life, as well practical as contemplative ; in that 
proportion does the mystical itself become liable 
to various forms of exaggeration and unhealthl- 
ness, while the Christianity which is content to 
remain non-mystical is impoverished at the 
centre of Its being. All Christians profess 
belief in the Holy Ghost. Had only all Chris- 
tians understood, and lived up to, their belief, 
they would all have been mystics : or in other 
words there would have been no mysticism." * 
Wherever mysticism is set up as separate from 
simple Christianity, or a separate department of 
Christian profession, we must be recalled from 



Moberly. Atonement and Personality, 3E5, 316, 



244 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

John's meditative Gospel to Mark's Deeds and 
Matthew's Words of the Master. Christ's full 
figure includes both the practical and the mys- 
tical. In Him the inward life makes itself 
manifest in character ; the interest in the world's 

life touches the soul to its deepest thought. ''It 
is as truly contemplation as activity, and activity 
as contemplation." 

The speculative mysticism of the disciple, 
apart from the practical purpose of the Master, 
tends to issue in dreams unrelated to life. That 
is what we are tempted to fall into in some of our 
special services, those which have no recognized 
provision in the Prayer Book. Such are the 
Three hours Meditations on The Seven Words 
from the Cross, repeated Good Friday after Good 
Friday. The first observance of such a service 
may carry us Into the inner sanctuary of the 
mystic. But these were hardly the only words 
Christ spoke from His Cross, nor do they exhaust 
what the three hours may teach. Repeated and 
prolonged ** meditation " on those exact sayings 
loses the life from the Cross, misses the spirit 
through a mystic reverence for the letter. 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 245 

While the mystic is the apocalyptist purified 
and modified, yet the final standing place for 
the Christian will not rest even with the mystic 
— he must express himself, teach his lesson, 
and pass on The book of Revelation, even at its 
best ; its golden streets ; its tears wiped away ; 
its new name written ; its absence of a temple ; 
its worship, that rests not day and night ; the 
ascription of its fifth chapter *' Blessing and 
honor and glory and power ; " and the picture of 
the twenty-second which sometimes seems to us 
to strike the loftiest note possible for human 
utterance — even these are not for all people and 
for all time the note of their complete harmony. 
To hymns of experience must succeed hymns of 
action, and the best hymn blends both in Its 
melody. There will be a better thing in the 
hereafter than the ceaseless worship with the 
redeemed ; and that will be, perhaps — but we 
are using the words of another mystic — preach- 
ing unto the spirits in prison with the Crucified. 
The test of even the mystic's truth must be, 
Does it find me, my whole self ? 



246 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

We have already in our Christian age, at least 
so far as it produces any real effect upon our 
lives, passed beyond the apocalyptic. We shall 
in due time also pass beyond the mystic, a more 
spiritual but not a final survival. We must first 
find its treasure ; we must hold on to the mysti- 
cal, till the man of action has become the man of 
sympathy, the man who does has also become 
the man who sees ; and that is not till Christ, 
both the Captain of our Salvation and the Seer 
of our vision, both King and Prophet, has been 
born in each one of us. 

Christianity has in itself a progressive power 
to escape out of the bonds of the temporary 
however confining. For the one pervasive 
Christian note, caught from the Master's own 
word, never dimmed by apparent failure, is con- 
fidence in the ultimate victory. That triumph- 
ant note will eliminate all, as it has already 
thrown aside many, marks of temporariness. 
For a little day we read the message as outward, 
behold ! the message is found to be a message 
of Christ, and His full word never stops short of 



IN THE APOCALYPTIC STYLE 247 



the inward. In the progressive conquest of final 
truth it is ever the outward that must recede 
and the inward that will survive ; for the inward 
is the man, and to the man all these things 
belong, and man is Christ's and Christ is God's. 

The following quotation from Dr. Hatch, sub- 
stituting the word mystic for the word allegori- 
cal, forms a fitting appendix to this lecture. 
" It (the Mystical) survives because it is based 
upon an element of human nature which is not 
likely to pass away : whatever be its value in 
relation to the literature of the past, it is at 
least the expression in relation to the present 
that our lives are hedged around by the un- 
known, that there is a haze about both our 
birth and our departure, and that even the 
meaner facts of life are linked to infinity, but 
two modern beliefs militate against it. One is 
that the thoughts of the past are relative to the 
past and must be interpreted by it. A written 
word is no more than a spoken word ; a spoken 
word is taken in the sense in which the speaker 
used it at the time at which he used it. The 
idea that ancient literature consists of riddles 



248 THE TEMPORARY AND THE PERMANENT 

which it is the business of modern literature to 
solve has passed forever away. The other belief 
is that the Spirit of God has not yet ceased to 
speak to man and it is important for us to know 
not only what He told the men of other days, but 
also what He tells them now. We can believe 
that there is a divine voice, but we find it hard 
to believe that it has died away to an echo from 
the Judean hills." * 



* Hatch. Influence of Greek Ideas, 83, 84. 



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